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thomblake comments on What if AI doesn't quite go FOOM? - Less Wrong
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Yeah, that doesn't quite nail it down either. Note Wiktionary:utility (3):
It ambiguously allows both 'needs' and 'wants', as well as ambiguous 'satisfaction experienced'.
The only consistent, formal definition of utility I've seen used in economics (or game theory) is the one I gave above. If it was clear someone was not using that definition, I might assume they were using it as more generic "preference satisfaction", or John Stuart Mill's difficult-to-formalize-coherently "pleasure minus pain", or the colloquial vague "usefulness" (whence "utilitarian" is colloquially a synonym for "pragmatic").
Do you have a source defining utility clearly and unambiguously as "the satisfaction of needs"?
No you're right it doesn't nail it down precisely (the satisfaction of needs or wants).
I do believe, however, that it more precisely nails it down than the wiki on here.
Or on second thoughts maybe not because we again come back to conflicting utilities: a suicidal might value being killed as higher utility than someone who is sitting on death row and doesn't want to die.
And I was using the term utility from economics since it's the only place I've heard where they use "utility function" so I naturally assumed that's what you were talking about since even if we disagree around the edges the meanings still fit the context for the purposes of this discussion.