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Is the concept of utility then anything other than tautological? If I understand what you're saying, it's roughly that, "A person chooses things, and since I im

Is the concept of utility then anything other than tautological? If I understand what you're saying, it's roughly that, "A person chooses things, and since I imagine that their choice process can be caricatured as a linearized ranking system, a utility measure must exist for them". I'm not saying that's a necessarily false model. But it strikes me as such a crashingly unsubtle simplification that I'd want to see a ton of data demonstrating that's really how it works. As opposed to just being something that academics assume so they can write bold, confident papers with conclusions that they like.

benlivengood 5y ago
Von-Neumann Morgenstern utility is mathematically precise; there is a real-numbered utility function such that maximizing utility is equivalent to choosing the correct lotteries according to an agent's preferences. So long as every decision one can have a preference about can be stated as a preference over expected outcomes (e.g. 50% chance of ice cream over 30% chance of cake, or related to the article: 90% child-one succeeds and 70% child-two succeeds v.s. 85% child-one succeeds and 74% child-two succeeds) then the utility function exists. Humans do not have utility functions. We have a lot of circular or contradictory preferences and other ancient machinery in our brains, and especially we do not reason about probabilities and expected outcomes accurately enough. We might be able to grow into having a utility function while still being happy about our preferences and without changing our humanity for the worse.