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timtyler comments on Morality as Parfitian-filtered Decision Theory? - Less Wrong
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Actually, the definition of "utility" is pretty simple. It is simply "that thing that gets maximized in any particular person's decision making". Perhaps you think that humans do not maximize utility because you have a preferred definition of utility that is different from this one.
Ok, that is a plausible sounding alternative to the idea of maximizing something. But the maximizing theory has been under scrutiny for 150 years, and under strong scrutiny for the past 50. It only seems fair to give your idea some scrutiny too. Two questions jump out at me:
Looking forward to hearing your answer on these points. If we can turn your idea into a consistent and plausible theory of human decision making, I'm sure we can publish it.
It looks as though it can be rearranged into a utility-maximization representation pretty easily. Set utility equal to minus the extent to which the "personally-defined tolerances" are exceeded. Presto!
Not quite - this would imply that tolerance-difference is fungible, and it's not. We can make trade-offs in our decision-making, but that requires conscious effort and it's a process more akin to barter than to money-trading.
Diamonds are not fungible - and yet they have prices. Same difference here, I figure.
What's the price of one red paperclip? Is it the same price as a house?
That seems to be of questionable relevance - since utilities in decision theory are all inside a single agent. Different agents having different values is not an issue in such contexts.
That's a big part of the problem right there: humans aren't "single agents" in this sense.
Humans are single agents in a number of senses - and are individual enough for the idea of revealed preference to be useful.
From the page you linked (emphasis added):
However, even if you ignore that, WARP is trivially proven false by actual human behavior: people demonstrably do sometimes choose differently based on context. That's what makes ordinal utilities a "spherical cow" abstraction.
(WARP's inapplicability when applied to real (non-spherical) humans, in one sentence: "I feel like having an apple today, instead of an orange." QED: humans are not "economic agents" under WARP, since they don't consistently choose A over B in environments where both A and B are available.)
The first sentence is true - but the second sentence doesn't follow from it logically - or in any other way I can see.
It is true that there are some problems modelling humans as von Neumann–Morgenstern agents - but that's no reason to throw out the concept of utility. Utility is a much more fundamental and useful concept.