Comments on: Utility Weight Results

By: Raikoth: Laws, Language, and Society | Slate Star Codex

Raikoth: Laws, Language, and Society | Slate Star Codex — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:51:23 +0000

[…] Utility Weight Results […]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Fri, 03 May 2013 03:35:29 +0000

This, exactly. When I considered the possibility of rating one of the options as worse than the floor state, I self-selected out of the survey.

Report comment

By: naath

naath — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:20:58 +0000

Even if you ignore that instruction…

I quite like my life, and I don’t want to die. For me death would be very bad.

But that doesn’t mean that I expect everyone else to feel similarly.

I think a big problem with trying to gauge the “utility” value of things is that different individuals put hugely different values on things. So if you are looking at “how do we spend the aid budget” it might make sense to do a survey and find what “most people” care most about and so forth; but if you have an individual person who for some reason *really does* have a choice between “death” and “North Korea” (for instance they just got caught being an illegal NK immigrant to China and the Chinese state says “we could execute you for your crime or send you home) then I think the “right” thing to do is not to say “in our survey 99% of people preferred NK so home you go” but to offer them the choice and see what they personally prefer.

I’m in favour of letting people kill themselves if they want to because I’m in favour of giving people as much choice as possible. For me “having the right to make my own choices” has a huge utility.

Report comment

By: anodognosic

anodognosic — Thu, 02 May 2013 06:26:06 +0000

I rated the billionaire option close to the high mark, and this was not my thinking at all. It was, rather, this: I have to work fairly long hours to roughly keep up the lifestyle that I want. I like my job, but at least half the time I’m working, I’d rather be doing something else. Part of the time that I’m not working, I’m doing chores that I wouldn’t have to do if I were a billionaire. I frequently worry about money, which takes its toll. I also still depend partly on my parents, the snag being that they have a somewhat different idea of the good life than I do. Having to work also keeps me from the kinds of leisure that would require prolonged absence, like travel. If I did not succumb to addiction or ennui, the combined extra free time, peace of mind, freedom, and lifestyle boost, as well as the money I could invest to make my work more enjoyable and fulfilling were I a billionaire might very well be worth two to three times my current utility.

Report comment

By: Michael Vassar

Michael Vassar — Thu, 02 May 2013 00:26:46 +0000

I think that the 1.3 result makes sense for having billions of dollars, and 2.75 might make sense for many people for the upgraded personal traits that would typically cause them to earn a billion dollars.

Report comment

By: im

im — Wed, 01 May 2013 22:30:59 +0000

… I might be skewed, since I am not just ‘single’ but have had no romantic interaction whatsoever, ever, and ‘ideal partner’ just sort of rounds off to ‘a good partner’ in my mind. Although I don’t know how much variance that is…

Report comment

By: Army1987

Army1987 — Wed, 01 May 2013 20:18:08 +0000

The next time he should add “(If your last name starts with Mc, O’, or similar, pick a version according to the first letter after that.)”, and/or split A-L and M-Z.

Report comment

By: Scott Alexander

Scott Alexander — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:44:52 +0000

Darnit, totally forgot about that. Have deleted that section.

Report comment

By: Randy M

Randy M — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:33:04 +0000

“I wouldn’t join any club that would have me for a member!” as the joke goes.

Report comment

By: sixes_and_sevens

sixes_and_sevens — Wed, 01 May 2013 19:30:48 +0000

I think falsifying utilitarianism is a category error, but I’m currently studying microeconomic models of welfare, and this is alerting me to an ever-growing number of problems with VNM-utilitarianism, as well as utilitarianism in general.

They tend to fall into one of two categories: failing to capture salient behaviour characteristics, and generation of unaccountable utility artefacts.

An example of the first would be procedural preferences, which you can’t specify as exogenous to the model. An example of the second would be caring preferences, where one agent’s utility function contains a term for the utility of another agent, resulting in arbitrarily huge feasible utility sets that don’t seem to actually correspond to anything.

When it comes down to it, it’s only a model.

Report comment