Comments on: Utilitarianism for Engineers, Part II

By: Army1987

Army1987 — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:40:56 +0000

It surely influenced mine, making the prison sound worse than if it hadn’t mentioned Guantanamo.

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By: Army1987

Army1987 — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:39:54 +0000

It’s also not clear how you should answer if you’re neither a man or a woman.

If you interpret the instructions literally, you should answer neither question.

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By: Kaj Sotala

Kaj Sotala — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:42:25 +0000

Meh, I started taking the survey, then stopped to ask Scott for clarification on one thing, and then when I had the time to get back to filling it out it was already closed.

My one comment from the bits that I managed to see would be that saying “a prison like Guantanamo Bay” and then “where you are not tortured or abused” felt confusing and contradictory, since my impression of Guantanamo Bay was that it’s pretty much a place that’s built for having prisoners tortured and abused. Don’t know whether that influenced anyone else’s answers.

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By: ozymandias42

ozymandias42 — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 08:38:16 +0000

I skipped both questions.

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By: Anonymous Coward

Anonymous Coward — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 05:23:07 +0000

Why call it a “Utility Measurement Test” if it asks about a subset of your utility (“effectively the quality of your life”)? Being a billionaire multiplies my total utility a lot more than my quality of life. There aren’t enough neurons to feel all of the utility I would get from that.

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By: yli

yli — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:02:09 +0000

Sorry, I mean it used the prison as a floor.

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By: yli

yli — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 00:01:44 +0000

I clicked N-Z, it used death as a floor, but when I finished I got the message “On the other version of this survey, instead of using death as a floor, it used the state of being stuck in a clean and humane but extremely boring prison cell. Which of these would you prefer? Which survey do you think makes a better way of eliciting preferences? You can answer in the comments section of Scott’s blog.”.

Also, some of the options, like North Korea, are *below* the floor, which made some questions impossible to answer.

I guess the survey was at least titled accurately.

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By: Vertebrat

Vertebrat — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:37:49 +0000

I did, and found the time and probability questions difficult — they’re a bit complicated, and it’s easy to get the two sides confused. I wouldn’t be surprised if people who started this version were less likely to finish than those taking the death version.

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By: Army1987

Army1987 — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 23:08:49 +0000

2) If I know I’ll live for exactly 10 years, I have a hard time taking “fear for my life” seriously.

I assumed that I would forget what the omniscient being told me after I made my choice.

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sun, 28 Apr 2013 22:29:30 +0000

I took the second survey. I actually quite like the idea of being in a prison cell with a prison library available. This made most things come out negative, and I couldn’t visualise at all what I was trading off in sections 2 and 3, sorry.

A more appropriate baseline for me would be death, or perhaps prison without a prison library. I still think North Korea would come out negative compared to both of those too though.

On the man/woman question, I wasn’t sure whether it referred to keeping your current gender and swapping your sex, or to swapping both sex and gender to match. I know from experience that if it referred to just swapping your sex, my personal utility comes out very negative (way below prison, and slightly below death if there is no opportunity to transition).

It’s also not clear how you should answer if you’re neither a man or a woman.

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