I bet a lot of people on this website will nod their head and think to themselves that they agree with your comment (because of the specific examples you gave),

I bet a lot of people on this website will nod their head and think to themselves that they agree with your comment (because of the specific examples you gave), but in my experience fewer than 1% of the general population and probably fewer than 5% of people on HN today are capable of actually thinking in a utilitarian manner. Even my smartest and most numerate acquaintances (let’s say +2-4 stddev, mostly scientists and engineers) have to be pushed to thinking this way about specific issues unless they have a background in economics or something. The concept of making decisions as part of an explicit optimization strategy, rather than as a result of applying a set of heuristics, is completely foreign to most people. Giving specific examples almost invariably pisses people off, because they’re emotionally invested in the heuristics being accurate. They would probably be fine in a tribal group of ~100 people with no out-group communication, but they scale very poorly to billions of people with an internet connection.