But what on earth does it mean to say that I like it “twice” as much as chocolate?
Obviously it means you would be willing to trade 2 units of chocolate ice cream for 1 unit of vanilla. And over the course of your life, you would prefer to have more vanilla ice cream than chocolate ice cream. Perhaps before you die, you will add up all the ice creams you’ve ever eaten. And you would prefer for that number to be higher rather than lower.
Nowhere in the above description did I talk about probability. And the utility function is already completely defined. I just need to decide on a decision procedure to maximize it.
Expected utility seems like a good choice, because, over the course of my life, different bets I make on ice cream should average themselves out, and I should do better than otherwise. But that might not be true if there are ice cream muggers. Which promise lots of ice cream in exchange for a down payment, but usually lie.
So trying to convince the ice cream maximizer to follow expected utility is a lost cause. They will just end up losing all their ice cream to muggers. They need a system which ignores muggers.
This is definitely not what I mean if I say I like vanilla twice as much as chocolate. I might like it twice as much even though there is no chance that I can ever eat more than one serving of ice cream. If I have the choice of a small serving of vanilla or a triple serving of chocolate, I might still choose the vanilla. That does not mean I like it three times as much.
It is not about “How much ice cream.” It is about “how much wanting”.
I’m saying that the experience of eating chocolate is objectively twice as valuable. Maybe there is a limit on how much ice cream you can eat at a single sitting. But you can still choose to give up eating vanilla today and tomorrow, in exchange for eating chocolate once.
Again, you are assuming there is a quantitative measure over eating chocolate and eating vanilla, and that this determines the measure of my utility. This is not necessarily true, since these are arbitrary examples. I can still value one twice as much as the other, even if they both are experiences that can happen only once in a lifetime, or even only once in the lifetime of the universe.
Sure. But there is still some internal, objective measure of value of experiences. The constraints you add make it harder to determine what they are. But in simple cases, like trading ice cream, it’s easy to determine how much value a person has for a thing.
Obviously it means you would be willing to trade 2 units of chocolate ice cream for 1 unit of vanilla. And over the course of your life, you would prefer to have more vanilla ice cream than chocolate ice cream. Perhaps before you die, you will add up all the ice creams you’ve ever eaten. And you would prefer for that number to be higher rather than lower.
Nowhere in the above description did I talk about probability. And the utility function is already completely defined. I just need to decide on a decision procedure to maximize it.
Expected utility seems like a good choice, because, over the course of my life, different bets I make on ice cream should average themselves out, and I should do better than otherwise. But that might not be true if there are ice cream muggers. Which promise lots of ice cream in exchange for a down payment, but usually lie.
So trying to convince the ice cream maximizer to follow expected utility is a lost cause. They will just end up losing all their ice cream to muggers. They need a system which ignores muggers.
This is definitely not what I mean if I say I like vanilla twice as much as chocolate. I might like it twice as much even though there is no chance that I can ever eat more than one serving of ice cream. If I have the choice of a small serving of vanilla or a triple serving of chocolate, I might still choose the vanilla. That does not mean I like it three times as much.
It is not about “How much ice cream.” It is about “how much wanting”.
I’m saying that the experience of eating chocolate is objectively twice as valuable. Maybe there is a limit on how much ice cream you can eat at a single sitting. But you can still choose to give up eating vanilla today and tomorrow, in exchange for eating chocolate once.
Again, you are assuming there is a quantitative measure over eating chocolate and eating vanilla, and that this determines the measure of my utility. This is not necessarily true, since these are arbitrary examples. I can still value one twice as much as the other, even if they both are experiences that can happen only once in a lifetime, or even only once in the lifetime of the universe.
Sure. But there is still some internal, objective measure of value of experiences. The constraints you add make it harder to determine what they are. But in simple cases, like trading ice cream, it’s easy to determine how much value a person has for a thing.