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Salemicus comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong
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In this context, I mean providing a service that someone else is willing to pay for.
By that definition, heroin is useful.
So by that notion, anything that is an externality but can't be captured by market forces is by definition not useful? Does that capture your intuition for the word useful?
I said is willing to pay for - not necessarily that they can pay for it. Any one-sentence definition of a word as complex as useful is going to necessarily be incomplete, but I certainly mean to include externalities in it. If, for example, people value "a sense of belonging to a community" and are willing to give up something meaningful for it, but co-ordination problems or whatever else means it can't be captured by market forces, then I would absolutely view someone who creates "a sense of belonging to a community" as useful - provided that the cost of their doing so is less than the price that the community members would be hypothetically willing to pay.
Fair enough. How do you determine then what people are counterfactually willing to pay?
I don't think anyone has a good way of doing that.
Would you grant that many things are valuable which are nevertheless not useful in that sense?
EDIT: I don't mean anything fancy here. Eating a hot dog, for example, is valuable (I'm willing to pay to do it) but not in any sense useful (no one is willing to pay me to do it).
Yes, sure. But I was talking about useful as a quality of a person, not as a quality of an object.
However, as my comments in this thread are getting voted down, I assume it's not really worthwhile to continue this conversation.