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Jiro comments on Open thread, 7-14 July 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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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 :-/