Agreed. To be fair to Zvi, he did make clear the sense in which he’s talking about “value” (those who value them most, as measured by their willingness to pay) [ETA: “their willingness and ability to pay” may have been better], but I fully agree that it’s not what most people mean intuitively by value.
I think what people intuitively mean is closer to: I value X more than you if: 1) I’d pay more for X in my situation than you’d pay for X in my situation. 2) I’d pay more for X in your situation than you’d pay for X in your situation.
(more generally, you could do some kind of summation over all situations in some domain)
The trouble, of course, is that definitions along these lines don’t particularly help in constructing efficient systems. (but I don’t think anyone was suggesting that they do)
Agreed on all points, except for about how clear the author was being about the use of the word “value”. Although he does make the reference to willingness to pay, his rhetorical point largely depends on people interpreting value in the colloquial sense. He writes, in the previous post:
If we’re not careful, next thing you know we’ll have an entire economy full of producing useful things and allocating them where they are valued most and can produce the most value. That would be the worst.
Imagine if you alter the phrasing to this, which is roughly equivalent under the “value = willingness + ability to pay” paradigm:
If we’re not careful, next thing you know we’ll have an entire economy full of producing useful things and allocating them to people who can pay the most money for them and where they can generate the mostwealth for those people. That would be the worst.
Many people might reasonably object to that scenario, even though it sounds silly when we phrase their objection as “I think we should allocate resources to people who value them less”. My own feelings are probably closer to the author’s than those of the hypothetical objectors, but I’d prefer it if we could avoid these kind of rhetorical techniques.
Agreed. To be fair to Zvi, he did make clear the sense in which he’s talking about “value” (those who value them most, as measured by their willingness to pay) [ETA: “their willingness and ability to pay” may have been better], but I fully agree that it’s not what most people mean intuitively by value.
I think what people intuitively mean is closer to:
I value X more than you if:
1) I’d pay more for X in my situation than you’d pay for X in my situation.
2) I’d pay more for X in your situation than you’d pay for X in your situation.
(more generally, you could do some kind of summation over all situations in some domain)
The trouble, of course, is that definitions along these lines don’t particularly help in constructing efficient systems. (but I don’t think anyone was suggesting that they do)
Agreed on all points, except for about how clear the author was being about the use of the word “value”. Although he does make the reference to willingness to pay, his rhetorical point largely depends on people interpreting value in the colloquial sense. He writes, in the previous post:
Imagine if you alter the phrasing to this, which is roughly equivalent under the “value = willingness + ability to pay” paradigm:
Many people might reasonably object to that scenario, even though it sounds silly when we phrase their objection as “I think we should allocate resources to people who value them less”. My own feelings are probably closer to the author’s than those of the hypothetical objectors, but I’d prefer it if we could avoid these kind of rhetorical techniques.