For our universe, other models have been extremely succesful. Therefore, the generality of wave functions clearly is not required. In case of (human) preferences, it is unclear whether another model suffices.
What you are saying seems to me a bit like: “Turing machines are difficult to use. Nobody would simulate this certain X with a Turing machine in practice. Therefore Turing-machines are generally useless.” But of course on some level of practical application, I totally agree with you, so mabye there is no real disagreement in the use of utility functions here—at least I would never say something like “my utility funtion is …” and I do not attempt to write a C-Compiler on a Turing machine.
I do not think that the statement “utility functions can model human preferences” has a formal meaning, however, if you say that it is not true, I would really be very interested in how you prefer to model human preferences.
For our universe, other models have been extremely succesful. Therefore, the generality of wave functions clearly is not required. In case of (human) preferences, it is unclear whether another model suffices.
What you are saying seems to me a bit like: “Turing machines are difficult to use. Nobody would simulate this certain X with a Turing machine in practice. Therefore Turing-machines are generally useless.” But of course on some level of practical application, I totally agree with you, so mabye there is no real disagreement in the use of utility functions here—at least I would never say something like “my utility funtion is …” and I do not attempt to write a C-Compiler on a Turing machine.
I do not think that the statement “utility functions can model human preferences” has a formal meaning, however, if you say that it is not true, I would really be very interested in how you prefer to model human preferences.