The word ‘utility’ can be used in two different ways: normative and descriptive.
You are describing ‘utility’ in the descriptive sense. I am using it in the normative sense. These are explained in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia page for ‘utility’.
As I explained in the opening paragraph, I’m using the word ‘utility’ to mean the goodness/desirability/value of an outcome. This is normative: if an outcome is ‘good’ then there is the implication that you ought to pursue it.
This looks like an exact duplicate of something you posted a month ago.
Is this intentional?
The second link is to a Scottish political campaign that doesn’t claim to know way the houses are empty (at least on this page) and doesn’t contain the 700,000 number in the link text (the linked political campaign claims 46,000 in Scotland and doesn’t seem to say anything about the UK).
The phrase ’700,000 empty homes throughout’ the UK has different links for each word: one for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. If you follow the link on 700,000, you will be taken to this page which gives a figure of 676,304 empty homes in England. Add this to the Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales figures and you get a total over 700,000. As explained in the link for English data (which makes up most of the total), the figure comes from Council tax data (council taxes are paid by the owners of a property and charges different rates depending on whether the home is occupied or unoccupied).
Hope this helps!
EDIT: AS POINTED OUT BY LOCALDEITY THIS COMMENT IS WRONG—I CONFUSED ANNUAL AND DAILY FISH DEATHS. HOWEVER, IT IS THE CASE THAT THIS POST OVERSTATES THE NUMBER OF FISH KILLED FROM FISH FARMS. SEE COMMENTS BELOW FOR CLARIFICATION.
I was going to call you out for a bit of a bait-and-switch in the paragraph starting ‘Lewis Bollard notes...’
Lewis Bollard notes “The fishing industry alone kills 3-8 billion animals every day, most by slow suffocation, crushing, or live disemboweling.” So roughly the same number of fish are killed in horrifying, inhumane ways every few days as there are people on earth.
because the 3-8 billion number is for *wild* fish killed each year, not farmed fish (Lewis Bollard cites this article which explicitly states ‘Marine invertebrates and farmed fish are not included in this estimate’). I can think of several reasons why eating wild caught fish is less bad than farmed fish (eg. the fish were not brought into existence by demand for them, wild conditions are less bad (?) than farm conditions, they were going to die anyway and dying a ‘natural’ death for a wild fish is plausibly no better than dying after being caught etc.)
However, after a cursory bit of background research it seems like the 3-8 billion figure massively *understates* your case. Two estimates that I found here and here suggest that the actual figure for annual farmed fish killed per year is somewhere between 50 and 170 billion.
Your paragraph using the 3-8 billion figure is still misleading, but the truth only strengthens your case.
Without wishing to be facetious: how much (if any) of the post did you read? If you disagree with me, that’s fine, but I feel like I’m answering questions which I already addressed in the post!
Are you arguing that we ought to (1) assign some “goodness” values to outcomes, and then (2) maximize the geometric expectation of “goodness” resulting from our actions?
I’m not arguing that we ought to maximize the geometric expectation of “goodness” resulting from our actions. I’m exploring what it might look like if we did. In the conclusion, (and indeed, many other parts of the post) I’m pretty ambivalent.
But then wouldn’t any argument for (2) depend on the details of how (1) is done? For example, if “goodnesses” were logarithmic in the first place, then wouldn’t you want to use arithmetic averaging?
I don’t think so. I think you could have a preference ordering over ‘certain’ world states and the you are still left with choosing a method for deciding between lotteries where the outcome is uncertain. I describe that this is my position in the section titled ‘Geometric Expectation Logarithmic Utility’.
Is there some description of how we should assign goodnesses in (1) without a kind of firm ground that VNM gives?
This is what philosophers of normative ethics do! People disagree on the how exactly to do it, but that doesn’t stop them from trying! My post tries to be agnostic as to what exactly it is we care about and how we assign utility to different world states, since I’m focusing on the difference between averaging methods.
Yeah, thanks for highlighting this. I started writing about it but realised I was out of my depth (even further out of my depth than for the rest of the post!) so I scrapped it.
Thanks for clarifying with Robert Rohde!
I reached roughly the conclusion you did. When water vapour is injected into the troposphere (the lowest level of the atmosphere) it is quickly rained out, as you point out. However, the power of the Hunga-Tonga explosion meant that the water vapour was injected much higher, into the stratosphere (what the diagram calls the ‘upper atmosphere’). For some reason, water vapour in the stratosphere doesn’t move back down and get rained out as easily so it sits there. Which is why ‘upper atmosphere’ water vapour levels are still elevated almost two years after the explosion.
Oh damn, you’re right. That was a stupid mistake.
Yes, so the 3-8 billion fish per day does overstate the number of farmed fish killed. The real number of farmed fish killed per day is somewhere between 0.1 billion and 0.5 billion, which is a lot less than the wild fish killed per day.
The purpose of participating in a game is to maximize performance, think laterally, exploit mistakes, and do everything you can, within the explicit rules, to win. Doing that is what makes games fun to play. Watching other people do that, at a level that you could never hope to reach is what makes spectator sports fun to watch.
I don’t know if you read the rest of the piece, but the point I was trying to make is that sometimes this isn’t true! Sometimes if each team does everything within the rules to win then the game becomes less fun to watch and play (you may disagree, but many sports fans feel this way). I already gave some examples where this happens in other sports, so I don’t see the need for your list of hypotheticals (and I feel like they are strawmen anyway).
For what its worth, I agree with you on Bairstow/Carey but which side you take on it is irrelevant (though I can see you are quite passionate about it!). The piece was about the ‘meta’ aspects of games which try to address these kind of issues.
Thanks for this comment-it explains your view very clearly and I understand what you are getting at now.
I think its a fair criticism. I’ve added footnotes within the post, linking people to your comment.
Sorry to be a party pooper, but I find the story of Jason Padgett (the guy who ‘banged his head and become a math genius’) completely unconvincing. From the video that you cite, here is the ‘evidence’ that he is ‘math genius’:
He tells us, with no context, ‘the inner boundary of pi is f(x)=x sin(pi/x)’. Ok!
He makes ‘math inspired’ drawings (some of which admittedly are pretty cool but they’re not exactly original) and sells them on his website
He claims that a physicist (who is not named or interviewed) saw him drawing in the mall, and, on the basis of this, suggested that he study physics.
He went to ‘school’ and studied math and physics. He says started with basic algebra and calculus and apparently ‘aced all the classes’, but doesn’t tell us what level he reached. Graduate? Post-graduate?
He was ‘doing integrals with triangles instead of integrals with rectangles’
He tells us ‘every shape in the universe is a fractal’
Some fMRI scans were done on his brain which found ‘he had conscious access to parts of the brain we don’t normally have access to’.
As far as I can tell, he hasn’t published any technical math/physics writings (peer-reviewed or otherwise). He wrote a book but as far as I can tell, this is mostly a memoir, with a bit of pop-math thrown in. From his website, this is what he’s working on:
Yep, those certainly are physics-y words! Good luck to him making progress in this area!
Its suspicious to me that he doesn’t have any writings on his mathematical works, so we are not able to judge what he’s doing. (Even time-cube man posted his writings on the internet)
This is my summary of the story:
He was hit on the head and experienced some changes after this. (Very believable )
These changes were significant enough to be visible on fMRI scans. (Also very believable )
He experienced OCD-like symptoms and other personality changes after the injury (I’m not a neuroscientist, but this seems plausible)
He experienced seeing visual distortions and ‘fractal-like’ images after the injury. (Again, I’m not a neuroscientist, but this seems plausible)
The visual hallucinations and personality changes caused him to be more interested in fractals, geometric designs, art, and math.
He took a few entry-level math classes and did ok in them.
The mugging took place in 2002 but apparently he hasn’t produced any technical writing in the subjects of math and physics.
In 2015, he was running futon stores in Washington State
This all leads me to believe that he is not ‘math genius’. I am agnostic about whether he is delusional about his abilities or whether he is a con-man.