I could go trawling through the literature to get you examples of non-preferentist usages of the words “utility function”, but if you’re willing to take my word for it, I can assure you that they’re pretty common (especially in happiness economics and pre-ordinalist economics, but also quite broadly apart from that). Indeed, it would be very strange if e.g. the hedonist account were a valid definition of utility, but no-one had thought to describe a mapping from states of the world into hedonist-utility as a utility function.
Guess I’ll take your word for it. Not sure I remember seeing that usage for “utility function” on LW, though.
ETA: It gets kind of confusing, because if I prefer that people are happy, their happiness becomes my utility, but in a way that doesn’t contradict utility functions as a description of preferences.
Not sure I remember seeing that usage for “utility function” on LW, though.
Many uses are ambiguous enough to encompass either definition. If you aren’t aware of the possible ambiguity then you’re unlikely to notice anything awry—at least up until the point where you run into someone who’s using a different default definition, and things start to get messy. (This has happened to me a couple of times.)
I could go trawling through the literature to get you examples of non-preferentist usages of the words “utility function”, but if you’re willing to take my word for it, I can assure you that they’re pretty common (especially in happiness economics and pre-ordinalist economics, but also quite broadly apart from that). Indeed, it would be very strange if e.g. the hedonist account were a valid definition of utility, but no-one had thought to describe a mapping from states of the world into hedonist-utility as a utility function.
Googling “experienced utility function” turns up a few examples, but there are many more.
Guess I’ll take your word for it. Not sure I remember seeing that usage for “utility function” on LW, though.
ETA: It gets kind of confusing, because if I prefer that people are happy, their happiness becomes my utility, but in a way that doesn’t contradict utility functions as a description of preferences.
Many uses are ambiguous enough to encompass either definition. If you aren’t aware of the possible ambiguity then you’re unlikely to notice anything awry—at least up until the point where you run into someone who’s using a different default definition, and things start to get messy. (This has happened to me a couple of times.)