You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

OrphanWilde comments on Open thread, March 17-31, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

1 Post author: David_Gerard 17 March 2013 03:37PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (173)
Tags: open open_thread

Comments (173)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 18 March 2013 04:01:55PM 3 points [-]

Anybody know of any good alternatives in Utilitarian philosophy to "Revealed Preference"? (That is, is there -any- mechanism in Utilitarian philosophy by which utility actually, y'know, gets assigned to outcomes?)

Comment author: Larks 22 March 2013 05:04:52PM 1 point [-]
  • Hedonistic Utilitarianism - produce the most pleasure.
  • Actual (not necessarily revealed) Preferences
  • Ideal preferences - produce the most of what people want to want, or would want under ideal reflective circumstances
  • Welfare Utilitarianism - produce the most welfare, which may differ from preferences if people don't want what's best for them.
  • Ideal Utilitarianism - outcomes can have value regardless of our attitude towards them

In every kind of utilitarianism, including revealed preference, utilities are assigned to outcomes. The varieties I've described, and revealed preference, just disagree about how to assign values to outcomes.

Comment author: OrphanWilde 22 March 2013 05:28:46PM 1 point [-]

These are different mechanisms to theoretically quantitate utility, but do they actually have implementations? (Revealed preference is unique in that it's an implementation, although a post-hoc one, and defined by the fact that the utility is qualitative rather than quantitative - that is, utility relationships are strictly relative)

None of these actually assign utility to outcomes, they just tell you what an implementation should look like.

Comment author: Larks 22 March 2013 10:20:56PM 0 points [-]

I'm not sure what you mean by an implementation if you think revealed preference is an implementation. We don't have revealed preference maximising robots.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit