Comment on Against utility functions

Sun, 22 Jun 2014 18:21:10 GMT

There are helpful models and there are unhelpful models. I can model the universe as a wave function in a gigantic Hilbert space, and this is an incredibly general model as it applies to any quantum-mechanical system, but it's not necessarily a helpful model for making predictions at the level I care about most of the time. My claim is that, even if you believe that utility functions can model human preferences (which I also dispute), then it's still true that utility functions are in practice an unhelpful model in this sense.

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