Crazy, evil, or just not understanding (at the instinctive level) that the figures in question are intended to represent absolute utility, with both social-emotional consequences and future implications already taken into account.
For many practical situations for which (10,9) may be used as a simplified model that extra 1 gives an actual loss in utilty.
I would only use the description ‘crazy’ once it had been explained in detail that:
No, we don’t mean you get 9 resources, your rival gets 10 and so you get laid less.
No, we don’t mean that your rival has greater resources now, and sowill be able to capitalise on that difference to further increase the discrepancy until he make himself your feudal lord.
While I acknowledge ignorance is a form of ‘crazy’, it would not be crazy to support (9,9) until such time as it can be demonstrated that these utility functions are actually the abstract ideals that is implied.
When someone says, “OK, the rich are getting richer and the poor are staying the same. This is not PE,” the problem is not solved by responding, “Well, just assume the numbers are utility values, and the problem disappears!” You cannot measure the utility (or especially the counterfactual utility) with any precision. So “They’re utilities!” as I’ve heard (and used) it, tends to be a hand-wavy manner of dismissing a potentially serious problem by assumption.
I think a lot of people stubbornly refuse to accept that such values represent utilities because that assumption requires a rather violent departure from reality and realistic measures. Nothing is ever measured or calculated in utilities, so if your model of PE denominates values in them, that model may be shiny and interesting and have lots of cool mathematical properties, but it ain’t very useful when we’re applying it to, say, income disparity.
Crazy, evil, or just not understanding (at the instinctive level) that the figures in question are intended to represent absolute utility, with both social-emotional consequences and future implications already taken into account.
For many practical situations for which (10,9) may be used as a simplified model that extra 1 gives an actual loss in utilty.
I would only use the description ‘crazy’ once it had been explained in detail that:
No, we don’t mean you get 9 resources, your rival gets 10 and so you get laid less.
No, we don’t mean that your rival has greater resources now, and sowill be able to capitalise on that difference to further increase the discrepancy until he make himself your feudal lord.
While I acknowledge ignorance is a form of ‘crazy’, it would not be crazy to support (9,9) until such time as it can be demonstrated that these utility functions are actually the abstract ideals that is implied.
When someone says, “OK, the rich are getting richer and the poor are staying the same. This is not PE,” the problem is not solved by responding, “Well, just assume the numbers are utility values, and the problem disappears!” You cannot measure the utility (or especially the counterfactual utility) with any precision. So “They’re utilities!” as I’ve heard (and used) it, tends to be a hand-wavy manner of dismissing a potentially serious problem by assumption.
I think a lot of people stubbornly refuse to accept that such values represent utilities because that assumption requires a rather violent departure from reality and realistic measures. Nothing is ever measured or calculated in utilities, so if your model of PE denominates values in them, that model may be shiny and interesting and have lots of cool mathematical properties, but it ain’t very useful when we’re applying it to, say, income disparity.