requiring my utility function to conform to VNM

If you don't conform to VNM, you don't have a utility function.

I think you mean to refer to your decision algorithms.

Is your process something like: "compare each option against the next until you find the worst and best?"

Yes, approximately.

It is becoming clear from this and other comments that you consider at least the transitivity property of VNM to be axiomatic.

I consider all the axioms of VNM to be totally reasonable. I don't think the human decision system follows the VNM axioms. Hence the project of defining and switching to this VNM thing; it's not what we already use, but we think it should be.

If VNM is required, it seems sort of hard to throw it out after the fact if it causes too much trouble.

VNM is required to use VNM, but if you encounter a circular preference and decide you value running in circles more than the benefits of VNM, then you throw out VNM. You can't throw it out from the inside, only decide whether it's right from outside.

What is the point of ranking other stuff relative to the 0 and 1 anchor if you already know the 1 anchor is your optimal choice?

Expectation. VNM isn't really useful without uncertainty. Without uncertainty, transitive preferences are enough.

If being a whale has utility 1, and getting nothing has utility 0, and getting a sandwich has utility 1/500, but the whale-deal only has a probability of 1/400 with nothing otherwise, then I don't know until I do expectation that the 1/400 EU from the whale is better than the 1/500 EU from the sandwich.

you probably can't gloss over by saying "first calculate the utility of all outcomes as a number then compare all your numbers on relative scale". We're just not built to compute naked utilities without reference anchors, and there does not appear to be a single reference anchor to which all outcomes can be compared.

That was one of the major points. Do not play with naked utilities. For any decision, find the 0 anchor and the 1 anchor, and rank other stuff relative to them.

In the process you probably do uncover examples of your preferences that will cause you to realize you are not VNM-compliant, but what rule system do you replace it with? Or is VNM correct and the procedure is to resolve the conflict with your own broken utility function somehow?

Yep, you are not VNM compliant, or the whole excercise would be worthless. The philosophy involved in actually making your preferences consistent is hard of course. I swept that part under the rug.

not right to just implicitly assume that they are the same thing.

Yes, good point. I was just listing words that people tend to throw around for that sort of problem. "awesome" is likewise not necessarily "good". I wonder how I might make that clearer...

If we take an outcome to be a world history, then "being turned into a whale for a day" isn't an outcome.

Thanks for pointing this out. I forgot to substantiate on that. I take "turned into a whale for a day" to be referring to the probability distribution over total world histories consistent with current observations and with the turned-into-a-whale-on-this-day constraint.

Maybe I should have explained what I was doing... I hope no one gets too confused.

I'm having trouble reconciling this

"Awesomeness" is IMO the simplest effective pointer to morality that we currently have, but that morality is still inconsistent and dynamic. I take the "moral philosophy" problem to be working out in explicit detail what exactly is awesome and what isn't, from our current position in morality-space, with all its meta-intuitions. I think this problem is incredibly hard to solve completely, but most people can do better than usual by just using "awesomeness". I hope this makes that clearer?

VNM, or just the concept of utility function, implies consequentialism

In some degenerate sense, yes, but you can easily think up a utility function that cares what rules you followed in coming to a decision, which is generally not considered "consequentialism". It is after all part of the world history and therefor available to the utility function.

We may have reached the point where we are looking at the problem in more detail than "consequentialism" is good for. We may need a new word to distinguish mere VNM from rules-don't-matter type stuff.

I've been very entertained by this framing of the problem - very fun to read!

I find it strange that you claim the date with Satan is clearly the best option, but almost in the same breath say that the utility of whaling in the lake of fire is only 0.1% worse. It sounds like your definition of clarity is a little bit different from mine.

On the Satan date, souls are tortured, steered toward destruction, and tossed in a lake of fire. You are indifferent to those outcomes because they would have happened anyway (we can grant this a premise of the scenario). But I very much doubt you are indifferent to your role in those outcomes. I assume that you negatively value having participated in torture, damnation, and watching others suffer, but it's not immediately clear if you had already done those things on the previous 78044 days.

Are you taking into account duration neglect? If so, is the pain of rape only slightly worse than burning in fire?

This probably sounds nitpicky; the point I'm trying to make is that computing utilities using the human brain has all kinds of strange artifacts that you probably can't gloss over by saying "first calculate the utility of all outcomes as a number then compare all your numbers on relative scale". We're just not built to compute naked utilities without reference anchors, and there does not appear to be a single reference anchor to which all outcomes can be compared.

Your system seems straightforward when only 2 or 3 options are in play, but how do you compare even 10 options? 100? 1000? In the process you probably do uncover examples of your preferences that will cause you to realize you are not VNM-compliant, but what rule system do you replace it with? Or is VNM correct and the procedure is to resolve the conflict with your own broken utility function somehow?

TL;DR: I think axiom #1 (utility can be represented as a single real number) is false for human hardware, especially when paired with #5.

That's not a bad essay (BTW, essays should be in quote marks, and the book itself, The Simpsons and Philosophy, in italics), but I don't think the quote is very interesting in isolation without any of the examples or comparisons.

Lambs are young sheep; they have less meat & less wool.

The punishment for livestock rustling being identical no matter what animal is stolen, you should prefer to steal a sheep rather than a lamb.

BART: It's weird, Lis: I miss him as a friend, but I miss him even more as an enemy.
LISA: I think you need Skinner, Bart. Everybody needs a nemesis. Sherlock Holmes had his Dr. Moriarty, Mountain Dew has its Mellow Yellow, even Maggie has that baby with the one eyebrow.

Everyone may need a nemesis, but while Holmes had a distinct character all his own and thus used Dr. Moriarty simply to test formidable skills, Bart actually seems to create or define himself precisely in opposition to authority, as the other to authority, and not as some identifiable character in his own right.

- Mark T. Conrad, "Thus Spake Bart: On Nietzche and the Virtues of Being Bad", The Simpsons and Philosophy: The D'Oh of Homer

This is true in theory, but do you think it's an accurate description of our real world?

(Nuclear power is potentially great, but with a bit more patience and care, we could stretch our non-nuclear resources quite a bit further, which would have given us more time to build stable(r) political systems.)

Voted up for the link to the video, which is a good explanation for why dumping hostility on people is not an effective method of convincing them.