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mwengler comments on Open thread, August 5-11, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion
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upvoted because of your username.
But seriously, folks, what does it mean to dot one person's values/utility function in to another? It is actually the differences in individual's utility functions that enable gains from trade. So the differences in our utility functions are probably what make us rich.
Counting the happiness of some people negatively as a policy suggestion, is that the same as saying "it is not the enough that I win, it must also be that others lose?"
I had initially thought that it would be something along the lines of "here is a vector, each component of which represents one thing you could want, take the inner product in the usual way, length has to always be 1." Gains from trade would be represented as "I don't want this thing as much as you do." I am now coming to the conclusion that this is at best incomplete, and that the suggestion of a weighted integral over a domain is probably better, if still incomplete.