A common mistake people make with utility functions is taking individual utility numbers as meaningful, and performing operations such as adding them or doubling them. But utility functions are only defined up to positive affine transformation.
Talking about "utils" seems like it would encourage this sort of mistake; it makes it sound like some sort of quantity of stuff, that can be meaningfully added, scaled, etc. Now the use of a unit -- "utils" -- instead of bare real numbers does remind us that the scale we've picked is arbitrary, but it doesn't remind us that the zero we've picked is also arbitrary, and encourages such illegal operations as addition and scaling. It suggests linear, not affine.
But there is a common everyday quantity which we ordinarily measure with an affine scale, and that's temperature. Now, in fact, temperatures really do have an absolute zero (and if you make sufficient use natural units, they have an absolute scale, as well), but generally we measure temperature with scales that were invented before that fact was recognized. And so while we may have Kelvins, we have "degrees Fahrenheit" or "degrees Celsius".
If you've used these scales long enough you recognize that it is meaningless to e.g. add things measured on these scales, or to multiply them by scalars. So I think it would be a helpful cognitive reminder to say something like "degrees utility" instead of "utils", to suggest an affine scale like we use for temperature, rather than a linear scale like we use for length or time or mass.
The analogy isn't entirely perfect, because as I've mentioned above, temperature actually can be measured on a linear scale (and with sufficient use of natural units, an absolute scale); but the point is just to prompt the right style of thinking, and in everyday life we usually think of temperature as an (ordered) affine thing, like utility.
As such I recommend saying "degrees utility" instead of "utils". If there is some other familiar quantity we also tend to use an affine scale for, perhaps an analogy with that could be used instead or as well.
I guess don't really see how "utils" encourages this mistake nor am I sure it is that common. I mean, the idea that most, if not all goods are not linear is 101-level stuff.
Meanwhile, "degrees of utility" is clumsier and "degree" has other meanings that don't involve scales. I am also against replacing adequate terminology used in academia with new terms unless there is very good reason. It is a bad idea to artificially increase the apparent distance between the work done here on decision theory and the work done elsewhere. There is way too much of that already. It makes for bad press and is phyg-like.
I don't understand this comment. I'm assuming the linearity of a good refers to whether its utility is a linear function of how many of it you have? In that sense, this is unrelated; this is a much broader issue, having nothing to do with how the utility of something varies with having multiple of it.
Although I suppose it is related in that, if "linear good" mea... (read more)