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Sewing-Machine comments on Rationality Quotes January 2013 - Less Wrong
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I find these criticisms by Vladimir_M to be really superb.
Okay. So none of that is an argument against VNM-rationality, it's an argument against a bunch of other ideas that have historically been attached to the label "utilitarian," right? The main thing I got out of that post is that utilitarianism is hard, not that it's wrong.
I don't know what you have in mind by your allusion to Morgenstern-von Neumann. The theorem is descriptive, right? It says you can model a certain broad class of decision-making entities as maximizing a utility function. What is VNM-rationality, and what does it mean to argue for it or against it?
If your goal is "to do the greatest good for the greatest number," or a similar utilitarian goal, I am not sure how the VNM theorem helps you.
What do you think of the "interpersonal utility comparison" problem? Vladimir_M regards it as something close to a defeater of utilitarianism.
"People should aim to be VNM-rational." I think of this as a weak claim, which is why I didn't understand why people appeared to be arguing against it. I concluded that they probably weren't, and instead meant something else by utilitarianism, which is why I switched to a different term.
Yes, that's why I think of "people should aim to be VNM-rational" as a weak claim and didn't understand why people appeared to be against it.
It seems like a very hard problem, but nobody claimed that ethics was easy. What does Vladimir_M think we should be doing instead?
What definition of "should" are you using here? Do you mean that people deontologically should aim to be VNM-rational? Or do you mean that people should be VNM-rational in order to maximize some (which?) utility function?
Can you spell this out a little more?
I don't know. I think this comment reveals a lot of respect for what you might call "folk ethics," i.e. the way normal people do it.
"People should aim for their behavior to satisfy the VNM axioms." I'm not sure how to get more precise than this.
OK. But this seems funny to me as a moral prescription. In fact a standard premise of economics is that people's behavior does satisfy the VNM axioms, or at least that deviations from them are random and cancel each other out at large scales. That's sort of the point of the VNM theorem: you can model people's behavior as though they were maximizing something, even if that's not the way an individual understands his own behavior.
Even if you don't buy that premise, it's hard for me to see why famous utilitarians like Bentham or Singer would be pleased if people hewed more closely to the VNM axioms. Couldn't they do so, and still make the world worse by valuing bad things?
Is "people should aim for their behavior to satisfy the VNM axioms" all that you meant originally by utilitarianism? From what you've written elsewhere in this thread it sounds like you might mean something more, but I could be misunderstanding.
Yes, but if I think that optimal moral behavior means using a specific utility function, somebody who isn't being VNM-rational is incapable of optimal moral behavior.
It's all I originally meant. I gathered from all of the responses that this is not how other people use the term, so I stopped using it that way.