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> Let’s introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total utility of 40. The thing is that da

> Let’s introduce another scenario: Imagine that the gifted boy has a total utility of 80, and the disabled boy has a total utility of 40. The thing is that day-to-day life doesn't provide those "scores" when it comes to humans and their interactions, life is not a video-game (even though we certainly do try our best at transforming it into that). Writing down that one could assign scores in such a scenario is normative, i.e. we take for granted that such scores are possible and, even more (that's what makes it normative, imo) we somehow impose on the reader the notion that he/she should regard this score-setting as a fact of life, as normal, at the limit that the reader herself should join the game of assigning scores to human actions.

vincnetas 5y ago
I think this is inevitable when you try to abstract and systematise anything. You cant think about big and complex things will all details in mind. You abstract. Same way you don't see a person in front of you as collection of millions cels. You see it as an entity.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >You abstract. The danger is that you end up with a "perfectly spherical cow" that you base your arguments then on, and your abstraction-based results then have no bearing whatsover to the real world.
  - vincnetas 5y ago
    I'm not saying that you must follow your abstractions blindly. At the end you must always test your theory against reality and adjust if reality contradicts your assumptions.
IshKebab 5y ago
Such scores are clearly possible. If you define a one-dimensional scale you can project everything onto it. Clearly you lose a lot of information in doing so, but if your scale is "overall utility" of some kind and that utility is the only thing you care about, then of course you can do it. In principle anyway - you can't actually calculate someone's utility. It's a thought experiment.
- xg15 5y ago
  But the one-dimensional scale also brings in a lot if implicit assumptions that you have to be aware of - e.g. that you can add or subtract individual utility values and the result will still be meaningful.
  - IshKebab 5y ago
    Yes that's true. 10 personal chefs do not have 10 times the utility of 1 personal chef.
xg15 5y ago
Yeah, fully agreed. I think trying to quantify such things can sometimes be useful as a tool of thinking, but you're always have to be extremely careful not to confuse the map with the territory. If you're making weird calculations with hypothetical utility values, you're making your argument on the map - and you always have to make sure it still makes sense when converted back to the territory. Numbers can also be used to make wildly unrealistic assumptions seem reasonable or hide additional circumstances that would be required for the argument to apply. E.g., if you mapped back the utility values from the OP to an actual situation, you'd have a gifted son who is somehow absolutely thrilled to move to the suburbs and a disabled son who is mostly indifferent about whether he has to travel for several hours frequently or not. The only situation I can think of in which that behaviour seems remotely plausible is if they were already living in the suburbs and the decision is really about moving to the city (and losing their complete social circle) or staying where they are. If that were the case, the "low additional utility" of the disabled son would more likely be a conflict: The son might appreciate a lot not having to travel so far, on the other hand, he doesn't want to lose all his friends. So, in numbers, a high positive and a high negative utility, which the theory assumes you can simply add up to get a total utility. But that assumption doesn't seem to have merit to me.
gorgoiler 5y ago
One way to reason about this: instead of the score being one person’s numerical value it is instead the percentage of people who make a binary choice. Put another way, you can calculate… 1 rating between 0 to N by sampling… N ratings of 0 or 1 So donuts-for-breakfast has a score of 5 not because it is quantifiably 5/100ths awful, but because only 1 in 20 people choose it.
ModernMech 5y ago
“Utility scores” and their close cousins “prior probability distributions” seem to me like a way for mathematically inclined brains to frame their decisions in “math” because anything else feels “irrational” and icky. To me, it seems like the assignment of priors and utilities scores is mostly arbitrary in these types of personal decision-making applications. How does one arrive at a score of 40 and 80? Does the magnitude of the difference mean anything? What’s the range on utility? If these are just random numbers plucked from thin air then how is utility different from a feeling which you can plug into some equations? How does saying one thing has 80 vs 40 utility mean anything other than “I feel a little better about this than that”? And if utility is just a numerical representation of a feeling, how do the results of these equations produce anything that we can interpret?
- robertlagrant 5y ago
  You can assign scores say in a health economics setting, where you're a public health system choosing the drugs to fund that will do the most good. Do you buy the drugs that keeps 70 year olds with X disease alive for 10 more years, or 20 year olds with Y disease alive for 2 more years? While it might be qualitative for individuals, it can become (more) quantitative for populations.

vincnetas 5y ago

I think this is inevitable when you try to abstract and systematise anything. You cant think about big and complex things will all details in mind. You abstract. Same way you don't see a person in front of you as collection of millions cels. You see it as an entity.

coldtea 5y ago
>You abstract. The danger is that you end up with a "perfectly spherical cow" that you base your arguments then on, and your abstraction-based results then have no bearing whatsover to the real world.
- vincnetas 5y ago
  I'm not saying that you must follow your abstractions blindly. At the end you must always test your theory against reality and adjust if reality contradicts your assumptions.

IshKebab 5y ago

Such scores are clearly possible. If you define a one-dimensional scale you can project everything onto it. Clearly you lose a lot of information in doing so, but if your scale is "overall utility" of some kind and that utility is the only thing you care about, then of course you can do it. In principle anyway - you can't actually calculate someone's utility. It's a thought experiment.

xg15 5y ago
But the one-dimensional scale also brings in a lot if implicit assumptions that you have to be aware of - e.g. that you can add or subtract individual utility values and the result will still be meaningful.
- IshKebab 5y ago
  Yes that's true. 10 personal chefs do not have 10 times the utility of 1 personal chef.

xg15 5y ago

Yeah, fully agreed. I think trying to quantify such things can sometimes be useful as a tool of thinking, but you're always have to be extremely careful not to confuse the map with the territory. If you're making weird calculations with hypothetical utility values, you're making your argument on the map - and you always have to make sure it still makes sense when converted back to the territory. Numbers can also be used to make wildly unrealistic assumptions seem reasonable or hide additional circumstances that would be required for the argument to apply. E.g., if you mapped back the utility values from the OP to an actual situation, you'd have a gifted son who is somehow absolutely thrilled to move to the suburbs and a disabled son who is mostly indifferent about whether he has to travel for several hours frequently or not. The only situation I can think of in which that behaviour seems remotely plausible is if they were already living in the suburbs and the decision is really about moving to the city (and losing their complete social circle) or staying where they are. If that were the case, the "low additional utility" of the disabled son would more likely be a conflict: The son might appreciate a lot not having to travel so far, on the other hand, he doesn't want to lose all his friends. So, in numbers, a high positive and a high negative utility, which the theory assumes you can simply add up to get a total utility. But that assumption doesn't seem to have merit to me.

gorgoiler 5y ago

One way to reason about this: instead of the score being one person’s numerical value it is instead the percentage of people who make a binary choice. Put another way, you can calculate… 1 rating between 0 to N by sampling… N ratings of 0 or 1 So donuts-for-breakfast has a score of 5 not because it is quantifiably 5/100ths awful, but because only 1 in 20 people choose it.

ModernMech 5y ago

“Utility scores” and their close cousins “prior probability distributions” seem to me like a way for mathematically inclined brains to frame their decisions in “math” because anything else feels “irrational” and icky. To me, it seems like the assignment of priors and utilities scores is mostly arbitrary in these types of personal decision-making applications. How does one arrive at a score of 40 and 80? Does the magnitude of the difference mean anything? What’s the range on utility? If these are just random numbers plucked from thin air then how is utility different from a feeling which you can plug into some equations? How does saying one thing has 80 vs 40 utility mean anything other than “I feel a little better about this than that”? And if utility is just a numerical representation of a feeling, how do the results of these equations produce anything that we can interpret?

robertlagrant 5y ago
You can assign scores say in a health economics setting, where you're a public health system choosing the drugs to fund that will do the most good. Do you buy the drugs that keeps 70 year olds with X disease alive for 10 more years, or 20 year olds with Y disease alive for 2 more years? While it might be qualitative for individuals, it can become (more) quantitative for populations.