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RichardKennaway comments on We Don't Have a Utility Function - Less Wrong
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Oh, not again! The thermostat is not modelled by a utility function at all. Utility functions are completely irrelevant to understanding a thermostat.
That's a silly assertion. A thermostat can be trivially modeled using a utility function. Positive utility for decresing temperatue when it is too high, and increasing it when it is too low. Zero utility for other behaviours. This is not a difficult case to understand.
You can also trivially model a thermostat using lego bricks. However, you don't need a lego-based model to understand a thermostat, it doesn't lend itself to the task, just like you don't arbitrarily choose a programming language regardless of your task just because it's Turing complete.
Nothing about a simple finite state machine like a thermostat that would cause a model-er to go "how can I drag utility functions into this", even if it is, of course, possible. I'd go so far as to assert that you could (but shouldn't) model anything that is computable in a way involving a utility function.
That's a complete straw man. I never claimed that you did. What I said was: "a utility function models its behaviour pretty well" - which is perfectly true.
Any computable agent. If it iisn't clear how to decompose a system into sensors and actuators, representation in terms of a utility function is not so useful - because it is not unique. It is convenient to use utility functions when you want to compare the values of different agents. If that's what you are doing, utility functions seem like a suitable tool.
Trivially. Quite. So trivially that anything at all can be "modelled" by a utility function at that level of triviality.
I've a great new utility-based model of the universe! The universe as it is has utility 1. Every other hypothetical universe has utility 0.
That's an Occam's razor fail, though. Explanations need to be concise to be satisfying. You'll find that, if you compress that utility function, you will be onto something interesting.