Salemicus comments on How minimal is our intelligence? - Less Wrong

55 Post author: Douglas_Reay 25 November 2012 11:34PM

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Comment author: Salemicus 22 November 2012 02:21:27AM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 22 November 2012 02:28:19AM 3 points [-]

Fair enough. How do you determine then what people are counterfactually willing to pay?

Comment author: Salemicus 22 November 2012 02:49:13AM 1 point [-]

I don't think anyone has a good way of doing that.