asr comments on Terminology suggestion: Say "degrees utility" instead of "utils" to prompt affine thinking - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Sniffnoy 19 May 2013 08:03AM

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Comment author: asr 20 May 2013 12:33:17PM *  1 point [-]

Yes, real human preference is routinely intransitive. That's a topic perhaps worth its own discussion.

The parent post is still relevant, though. Inasmuch as utilitarian calculations are a useful approximation to human decisionmaking, it's worth reminding people here that utilities don't have a natural magnitude scale and that there's no natural way to compare them across agents.