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