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Nick_Tarleton comments on On dollars, utility, and crack cocaine - Less Wrong
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Comments (97)
If you "really want to maximize" X, how is X not utility?
I think the point Phil tries to make is the difference between “instantaneous utility”, that is a function on things at some point in time (actually, phase space), and the “general utility”, which is a function that also has time (or position in phase space) as an argument.
While not immediately obvious, I think his naming choice could be worse. According to my non-scientific poll of one (me), when seeing the word “happiness” people think of time as a parameter instinctively, but consider specific instants for “utility” unless there are other cues in the context.
A strict definition such as yours would require coining a few new words for the discussion. That's not a bad thing per se, I just can't think of any that have the advantage of being already used as such in general vocabulary.
This is an area that is generally plagued with ambuiguities and inconsistent usage. - which makes it even more important to be clear what we mean. I think this will usually this will require the use of adjectives/modifiers, rather than attempting to define already ambiguous words in our own idiosyncratically-preferred ways.
Instantaneous vs. life-time (or smaller life-slice) utility seems to make a clear distinction; decision-utility (i.e. the utility embodied in whatever function describes our decisions) vs. experienced utility (e.g. happiness or other psychological states) seem to make clear-ish distinctions. (Though if we care about non-experienced things, then maybe we need to further distinguish either of these from true-utility.)
But using "utility" and "happiness" to distinguish between different degrees of time aggregation seems unnecessarily confusing to me.
Yes, thanks; that's what I meant.