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Jiro comments on Open thread, 7-14 July 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (232)
In the IQ example, you can't shut up and multiply because you're supposed to multiply utilons, but the calculation showing that the IQ test is better measures job-productivity-years, not utilons. Most people don't think that utilons are linear with job-productivity-years; for instance, having one person out of 100 permanently unemployed is worse than having every person in the 100 lose 1% of the years they would otherwise have worked. That difference is what makes the IQ test scenario bad.
In the disease example, either you die or you don't,, so as long as you assign more utilons to not dying than to dying, your utilon assignment doesn't affect how the two scenarios compare.
(You are of course correct about male professors at Harvard.)
This calculation completely neglects the utility generating function of productivity.
No, it doesn't. That function affects the calculation by increasing the total utilions we attribute to productivity. Unless the increase is infinite, it is still possible for the loss in utility from high variance to outweigh the gain in utility from increased productivity.
This only works if the main contribution to utility from working consists of the personal fulfillment of the worker rather than the benefits generated by the work.
Only in the sense that any measure of utility that involves the condition of a person consists of their personal fulfillment.
You're argument essentially amounts to arguing that we should give people with low skills make-work jobs in order to increase utility.
"Make-work" carries the connotation that the productivity of the worker is less valuable than his pay. "Less valuable than optimum" is not the same as "less valuable than his pay". Furthermore, "low skills" carries the inapt connotation "very low" (and low-testing doesn't necessarily imply low skills anyway.)
The problem is that someone who is either marginally less productive, or marginally worse at testing, can find his ability to get a job decreased by an amount all out of proportion to how worse he is, if all employers use the same measure. Ensuring that such people can get jobs isn't make-work.
Is there some reason why most of my posts in this thread are modded down, other than disagreement?
Are you talking descriptive or normative?
If descriptive, most people don't think in terms of utilons at all, and if normative I would like to see some arguments for the assertion that differences in wealth/income generate negative utility.
Most people have beliefs which imply a comparison in which utilons are not linear with job-productivity-years.
Please demonstrate that the beliefs of "most people" involve utilons at all.
Not to mention that under standard interpretation of utility, it's NOT summable across different people.
Huh?
People can have beliefs which imply a comparison of utilons, without those people believing in utilons.
I didn't invoke "most people" to suggest that utility can be compared among people. I invoked it because you are presumably coming up with these utilon calculations as a way to formalize preexisting beliefs, in which we need to figure out what those preexisting beliefs are and what they imply.
Utilons are not a feature of reality. They are a concept that some people use to think about comparative usefulness of things.
What you are saying is that people who think in terms of utilons can reinterpret other people's value judgments in these terms. But that's just a map which redraws another map.
Utilon-less maps do not "imply" utilons.
I am not coming up with utilon calculations. I am explicitly rejecting the the idea that the desirability of complete equality somehow falls out of utilon calculations -- primarily because I don't think you can calculate with utilons in this way.
In that case, your argument is with Vaniver, who thinks we can "shut up and multiply" in deciding what is good for a population, which implicitly means that we will be multiplying utilons across members of a population, and that job-productivity-years are linear with utilons. If you cannot aggregate utilons across people, then nothing said here matters.
While that may or may not be so, what are your opinions on whether you can calculate with utilons in this way?
I think that if you can't compare utilons among states of aggregations of people, you can't make very basic comparisons of a type that pretty much everyone makes. You have to at least have a partial order which allows at least some comparisons.
That sounds like a very... lukewarm assertion. So maybe you can't make very basic comparisons of a type that pretty much everyone makes?
The basic issue is that you need to have a single metric applied to everything you're trying to aggregate and I don't think it works this way with estimates of individual utility. You need to convert utilons into something more universal and that typically ends up being dollars :-/