V_V comments on How To Have Things Correctly - Less Wrong

57 Post author: Alicorn 17 October 2012 06:10AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (218)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: V_V 18 October 2012 03:37:07PM 1 point [-]

I'm not sure what we are exactly disagreeing about.

I'm assuming that the cloak is not a Veblen good, hence the utility of wearing it is not correlated with its price.

What do you mean by "best thing in the wardrobe"?

Comment author: Decius 18 October 2012 11:44:41PM -1 points [-]

"The best thing in the wardrobe" is that which, when worn today, will have the highest expected utility.

Comment author: DaFranker 18 October 2012 03:46:56PM *  -1 points [-]

If the price correlates with the amount of effort you put into convincing yourself to enjoy wearing it, and that effort correlates with how much you enjoy wearing the cloak later on, then yes the price is correlated with the utility of wearing the cloak.

If this price-causes-effort-causes-enjoyment chain brings the total net utility of the cloak from "not the best thing" to "the best thing", then you're still winning because there was a potential profit margin in the enjoyment compared to the price and effort costs, and you took the opportunity to make some utilitarian profit.