In school I learned about utility in context of constructing decision problems. You rank the possible outcomes of a scenario in a preference ordering. You assign utilities to the possible outcomes, using an explicitly mushy, introspective process—unless money is involved, in which case the “mushy” step came in when you calibrated your nonlinear value-of-money function. You estimate probabilities where appropriate. You chug through the calculations of the decision tree and conclude that the best choice is the one that results probablistically in the best outcome as described by proxy as the outcome with the greatest probability-weighted utility.
That’s all good. Assuming you can actually do all of the above steps, I see no problem at all with using utility in that way. Very useful for deciding whether to drill a particular oil well or invest in a more expensive kind of ball bearing for your engine design.
But if you’ve ever actually tried to do that for, say, an important life decision, I would bet money that you ran up against problems. (My very first post on lesswrong.com concerned a software tool that I built to do exactly this. So I’ve been struggling with these issues for many years.) If you’re having trouble making a choice, it’s very likely that your certainty about your preferences is poor. Perhaps you’re able to construct the decision tree, and find that the computed “best choice” is actually highly sensitive to small changes in the utility values of the outcomes, in which case, the whole exercise was pointless, aside from the fact that it explicated why this was a hard decision, but on some level you already knew that, after all that’s why you were building a decision tree in the first place.
---
Another property of 3D space is that there is, in fact, a natural and useful definition of a norm, the 3D vector magnitude, which gives us the intuitive quantity “total distance”. I daresay physics would look very different if this weren’t the case.
“Total distance” (or vector magnitude or whatever) is both real and useful. “Real” in the sense that physics stops making sense without it. “Useful” in the sense that engineering becomes impossible without it.
My contention with “utility” is not real and only narrowly useful.
It’s not real because, again, there’s no neurological correlate for utility, there’s no introspective sense of utility, utility is a purely abstract mathematical quantity.
It’s only narrowly useful because, at best, it helps you make the “best choice” in decision problems in a sort of rigorously systematic way, such that you can show your work to a third party and have them agree that that was indeed the best choice by some pseudo-objective metric.
All of the above is uncontroversial, as far as I can tell, which makes it all the weirder when rationalists talk about “giving utility”, “standing on top of a pile of utility”, “trading utilons”, and “human utility functions”. None of those phrases make any sense, unless the speaker is using “utility” in some kind of folk terminology sense, and departing completely from the actual definition of the concept.
At the risk of repeating myself, this community takes certain problems very seriously, problems which are only actually problems if utility is the right abstraction for systematizing human wellbeing. I don’t see that it is, unless you find yourself in a situation where you can converge on a clear preference ordering with relatively good certainty.
Perhaps you’re able to construct the decision tree, and find that the computed “best choice” is actually highly sensitive to small changes in the utility values of the outcomes, in which case, the whole exercise was pointless, aside from the fact that it explicated why this was a hard decision
Are you sure that optimizing oil wells and ball bearings causes no such problems? These sound like generic problems you’d find with any sufficiently complex system, not something unique to human condition and experience.
I could argue that the abstract concept of utility is both quite real/natural and a useful abstraction, but there is nothing too disagreeable in your above comment. What bothers me is, I don’t see how adding more dimensions to utility solves any of the problems you just talked about.
If these are indeed problems that crop up with any sufficiently complex system, that’s even worse news for the idea that we can/should be using utility as the Ur-abstraction for quantifying value.
Perhaps adding more dimensions doesn’t solve anything. Perhaps all I’ve accomplished is suggesting a specific, semi-novel critique of utilitarianism. I remain unconvinced that I should push past my intuitive reservations and just swallow the Torture pill or the Repugnant Conclusion pill because the numbers say so.
That being said, every formulation of Utilitarianism that I can find depends on some sense of the “most good” and utility is a mathematical formalization of that idea. My quibble is less with the idea of doing the “most good” and more with the idea that the “most good” precisely corresponds to VNM utility.
Ur- is a prefix which strictly mean “original” but which I was using here intending more of a connotation of “fundamental”. Also I probably shouldn’t have capitalized it.
My point is that you can accept that “most good” does in fact correspond to VNM utility but reject that we want to add up this “most good” for all people and maximize the sum.
Hm. Yeah, you can accept that. You can choose to. I’m not arguing that you can’t — if you accept the axioms, then you must accept the conclusions of the axioms. I just don’t see why you would feel compelled to accept the axioms.
I feel a very strong urge to accept transitivity, others I care somewhat less about, but they seem reasonable too.
then you must accept the conclusions of the axioms
Which conclusions? To reiterate, my point is that “the Torture pill or the Repugnant Conclusion” don’t follow immediately from the existence of individual utility. They also require a demand to increase the total sum of utilities for a category of agents, which does sound vaguely good, but isn’t the only option.
Perhaps the following context will be useful.
In school I learned about utility in context of constructing decision problems. You rank the possible outcomes of a scenario in a preference ordering. You assign utilities to the possible outcomes, using an explicitly mushy, introspective process—unless money is involved, in which case the “mushy” step came in when you calibrated your nonlinear value-of-money function. You estimate probabilities where appropriate. You chug through the calculations of the decision tree and conclude that the best choice is the one that results probablistically in the best outcome as described by proxy as the outcome with the greatest probability-weighted utility.
That’s all good. Assuming you can actually do all of the above steps, I see no problem at all with using utility in that way. Very useful for deciding whether to drill a particular oil well or invest in a more expensive kind of ball bearing for your engine design.
But if you’ve ever actually tried to do that for, say, an important life decision, I would bet money that you ran up against problems. (My very first post on lesswrong.com concerned a software tool that I built to do exactly this. So I’ve been struggling with these issues for many years.) If you’re having trouble making a choice, it’s very likely that your certainty about your preferences is poor. Perhaps you’re able to construct the decision tree, and find that the computed “best choice” is actually highly sensitive to small changes in the utility values of the outcomes, in which case, the whole exercise was pointless, aside from the fact that it explicated why this was a hard decision, but on some level you already knew that, after all that’s why you were building a decision tree in the first place.
---
Another property of 3D space is that there is, in fact, a natural and useful definition of a norm, the 3D vector magnitude, which gives us the intuitive quantity “total distance”. I daresay physics would look very different if this weren’t the case.
“Total distance” (or vector magnitude or whatever) is both real and useful. “Real” in the sense that physics stops making sense without it. “Useful” in the sense that engineering becomes impossible without it.
My contention with “utility” is not real and only narrowly useful.
It’s not real because, again, there’s no neurological correlate for utility, there’s no introspective sense of utility, utility is a purely abstract mathematical quantity.
It’s only narrowly useful because, at best, it helps you make the “best choice” in decision problems in a sort of rigorously systematic way, such that you can show your work to a third party and have them agree that that was indeed the best choice by some pseudo-objective metric.
All of the above is uncontroversial, as far as I can tell, which makes it all the weirder when rationalists talk about “giving utility”, “standing on top of a pile of utility”, “trading utilons”, and “human utility functions”. None of those phrases make any sense, unless the speaker is using “utility” in some kind of folk terminology sense, and departing completely from the actual definition of the concept.
At the risk of repeating myself, this community takes certain problems very seriously, problems which are only actually problems if utility is the right abstraction for systematizing human wellbeing. I don’t see that it is, unless you find yourself in a situation where you can converge on a clear preference ordering with relatively good certainty.
Are you sure that optimizing oil wells and ball bearings causes no such problems? These sound like generic problems you’d find with any sufficiently complex system, not something unique to human condition and experience.
I could argue that the abstract concept of utility is both quite real/natural and a useful abstraction, but there is nothing too disagreeable in your above comment. What bothers me is, I don’t see how adding more dimensions to utility solves any of the problems you just talked about.
If these are indeed problems that crop up with any sufficiently complex system, that’s even worse news for the idea that we can/should be using utility as the Ur-abstraction for quantifying value.
Perhaps adding more dimensions doesn’t solve anything. Perhaps all I’ve accomplished is suggesting a specific, semi-novel critique of utilitarianism. I remain unconvinced that I should push past my intuitive reservations and just swallow the Torture pill or the Repugnant Conclusion pill because the numbers say so.
Maybe you’re confusing utility with utilitariansim? The two are not identical.
I’m going to be using utility until you propose something better. What’s “Ur”, by the way?
Not confused, just being lazy with language.
That being said, every formulation of Utilitarianism that I can find depends on some sense of the “most good” and utility is a mathematical formalization of that idea. My quibble is less with the idea of doing the “most good” and more with the idea that the “most good” precisely corresponds to VNM utility.
Ur- is a prefix which strictly mean “original” but which I was using here intending more of a connotation of “fundamental”. Also I probably shouldn’t have capitalized it.
My point is that you can accept that “most good” does in fact correspond to VNM utility but reject that we want to add up this “most good” for all people and maximize the sum.
Hm. Yeah, you can accept that. You can choose to. I’m not arguing that you can’t — if you accept the axioms, then you must accept the conclusions of the axioms. I just don’t see why you would feel compelled to accept the axioms.
I feel a very strong urge to accept transitivity, others I care somewhat less about, but they seem reasonable too.
Which conclusions? To reiterate, my point is that “the Torture pill or the Repugnant Conclusion” don’t follow immediately from the existence of individual utility. They also require a demand to increase the total sum of utilities for a category of agents, which does sound vaguely good, but isn’t the only option.