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PhilGoetz comments on Humans are utility monsters - Less Wrong
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Saying that a utility monster means a "creature that is somehow more capable of experiencing pleasure (or positive utility) than all others combined" is vague, because it doesn't mean a creature that's just more capable, it's a creature that's a specific kind of "more capable". Just because human beings can experience more utility from the same actions than nematodes can doesn't make humans into utility monsters, because that's the wrong kind of "more capable". According to your own link, a utility monster is not susceptible to diminishing marginal returns, which doesn't seem to describe humans and certainly isn't a distinction between humans and nematodes.
The qualification that a utility monster is not susceptible to diminishing marginal returns is made only because they're still assuming utility is measured in something like dollars, which has diminishing marginal returns, rather than units of utility, which do not. Removing that qualification doesn't banish the utility monster. The important point is that the utility monster's utility is much larger than anybody else's.
Removing that qualification does banish the utility monster. If the utility monster gets greater utility from dollars than someone else (let's say nematodes), but is still subject to diminishing marginal returns (at a slower rate than nematodes), then the utilitarian result is to start giving dollars to the utility monster until its utility-per-dollar has diminished enough to match the starting utility-per-dollar of the nematodes, and then to give to both the utility monster and the nematodes in a proportion which keeps them at the same rate. The "utility monster" has ceased to be a utility monster because it no longer gets everything. It still gets more, of course, but that's the equivalent of deciding that the starving person gets the food before the full person.
This sounds like it could be almost as repugnant as a utility monster that gets literally everything, depending on precisely how much "more" we're talking about.
Edit: if I were the kind of person who found utility monsters repugnant, that is. I'd already dissolved the "OMG what if utility monsters??" problem in my own mind by reasoning that the repugnant feeling comes from representing utility monsters as black boxes, stripping away all of the features of theirs that make it intuitively obvious why they generate more utility from the same inputs. Put another way, the things that make real-life utility monsters "utility monsters" are exactly the things that make us fail to recognize them as utility monsters. When a parent values their child's continued existence far more than their own, we don't call the child a "utility monster" if the parent sacrifices themselves to save their child, even though that's exactly the child's role in that situation.
Re. "black box", nice way of putting it. This post just gives an example where we can look inside the black box.
I want to criticise either the idea that diminishing returns is important, or, at least, that dollar values make sense for talking about them.
Suppose we have a monster who likes to eat. Each serving of food is just as tasty as the previous, but he still gets diminishing returns on the dollar, because the marginal cost of the servings goes up.
We also have nematodes, who like to eat, but not as much. They never get a look in, because as the monster eats, they also suffer diminished utilons per dollar.
So the monster is serving the 'purpose' of the utility monster, but still has diminishing returns on the dollar. If we redefine diminishing returns to be on something else, I'm not sure it could be well justified or immune to this issue.
And, although humans are not an example of this sort of monster, the human race certainly is.
Units of utility are non-fungible, right?
They surely are fungible. The whole point of using utility functions in the first place, is that I can't convert apples into children saved, but I can convert utilons gained from eating apples into utilons gained from saving children, because both are just real numbers.
But you can't take utilons from the apple tree and give them to the children.
I guess I meant 'transferable' instead of 'fungible', or perhaps something else. The utility monster being associated with more utility does not require that the rest of the world be associated with less.
Right; I can't give you one of my utilons directly.
If the world is already in a Pareto-optimal state, then changing it to benefit the utility monster would require making someone else worse off.
What does the Pareto-optimal state look like if a Utility Monster exists?
Pareto-optimal means that no one can be made better off without making someone else worse off. It doesn't care about how much better off it can make someone, so the existence of a Utility Monster makes no difference to which states are Pareto-optimal. Pareto-optimal could range all the way from giving all the resources to the Utility Monster to giving nothing to the Utility Monster.
So my comment was fairly trivial from the definition of Pareto-optimal; I was just trying to emphasize that there generally are a wide range of Pareto-optimal states; you can't just increase the utility for one person arbitrarily high without trading it off against someone else's utility; you can start, but eventually you hit a Pareto-optimal state, and then you've got tradeoffs to make.
It looks like you are taking some kind of sum across all agents as the utility of the world; that is incompatible with the basic assumption of the utility monster as I understand it.
The utility monster is something such that as it controls scarce resources, the marginal utility that it contributes to the world as a whole (per additional resource that it controls/consumes) increases. (With everything else having a decreasing marginal return).
The argument is that such a creature would receive all of the resources, and that is bad; the counterargument is that given the described setup, giving the utility monster all of the resources is good, and the fact that we intuit that it is bad is a problem with our intuition and not the math.
As far as I can tell, the definition involving increasing marginal returns was invented by some wikipedian. Wikipedia does not cite a source for that definition. According to every other source, a utility monster is an agent who gets more utility from having resources than anyone else gets from having resources, regardless of how the utility monster's marginal value of resources changes with the amount of resources already controlled.
Either way, the argument for giving the utility monster all the resources comes from maximizing the sum of the utilities of each agent. I'm not sure what you mean by this being incompatible with the assumption of the utility monster.
Edit: Also, rereading my previous comment, I notice that I was actually not taking a sum across the utilities of all agents. Pareto-optimal does not mean maximizing such a sum. It means a state such that it is impossible to make anyone better off without making anyone else worse off.
'Fungible' means you don't care where you get your utilons from, as long as it's the same number of utilons.
Yes, I used the wrong term. For 'fungible' to be cogent in reference to a utility monster, utilons would have to be transferable.
Presumably, that's diminishing marginal returns relative to dollars input. In other words, "You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are."