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crazy88 comments on CEV-inspired models - Less Wrong Discussion
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Sorry if this is answered elsewhere but I thought interpersonal comparisons of utility were generally considered to be impossible.
Is the crucial difference about CEV the fact that it doesn't attempt to maximise the utility of humanity but rather to extract the volition of humanity by treating each person's input equally without attempting to claim that utility is being compared between people to do so? Or does CEV involve interpersonal comparison of utility and, if so, why is this not considered problematic?
This is true about aggregating ordinal utilities, but doesn't hold for cardinal utilities (see Arrow's theorem). If you are talking about comparing utilities (i.e. choosing a normalization method), I'm not aware of a general consensus that this is impossible.
Economists generally regard interpersonal utility comparisons as impossible; hence the focus on Pareto, and then Kalder-Hicks, optimality. See for example this, though any decent economics textbook will cover it.
The problem, of course, is that utility functions are only defined up to an affine transformation.
Which is why I normalise them first before adding them up.
Not impossible, just challenging.
It's hard. You can do it, in many ways, but most of the properties you'd want to have cannot be had. The max-min method of normalisation I mentioned has the most of the intuitive properties (despite not being very intuitive itself).
If you have the time, I'd be interested to know what these desirable properties are (or would be happy to read a paper on the topic if you have one to suggest).
We're working on those at the moment, so they're still in flux; but we'll put them out there once we've firmed them up.
Cool, I'll keep my eye out.