They may be a bad descriptive match. But in prescriptive terms, how
do you “help” someone without a utility function?
Isn’t “helping” a situation where the prescription is derived from the
description? Are you suggesting we lie about others’ desires so we can
more easily claim to help satisfy them?
Helping others can be very tricky. I like to wait until someone has
picked a specific, short term goal. Then I decide whether to help them
with that goal, and how much.
I think Eliezer is simply saying: “I can’t do everything, therefore I must decide where I think the marginal benefits are greatest. This is equivalent to attempting to maximize some utility function.”
A simple utility function can be descriptive in simple economic models, but taken as descriptive, such function doesn’t form a valid foundation for the (accurate) prescriptive model.
On the other hand, when you start from an accurate description of human behavior, it’s not easy to extract from it a prescriptive model that could be used as a criterion for improvement, but utility function (plus prior) seems to be a reasonable format for such a prescriptive model if you manage to construct it somehow.
Isn’t “helping” a situation where the prescription is derived from the description? Are you suggesting we lie about others’ desires so we can more easily claim to help satisfy them?
Helping others can be very tricky. I like to wait until someone has picked a specific, short term goal. Then I decide whether to help them with that goal, and how much.
I think Eliezer is simply saying: “I can’t do everything, therefore I must decide where I think the marginal benefits are greatest. This is equivalent to attempting to maximize some utility function.”
Not necessarily. There are lots of plausible moral theories under which individuals’ desires don’t determine their well-being.
Derivation of prescription from description isn’t trivial.
That’s the difference between finding the best plan, and conceding for a suboptimal plan because you ran out of thought.
I agree with both those statements, but I’m not completely sure how you’re relating them to what I wrote.
Do you mean that the difficulty of going from a full description to a prescription justifies using this particular simpler description instead?
It might. I doubt it because utility functions seem so different in spirit from the reality, but it might. Just remember it’s not the only choice.
A simple utility function can be descriptive in simple economic models, but taken as descriptive, such function doesn’t form a valid foundation for the (accurate) prescriptive model.
On the other hand, when you start from an accurate description of human behavior, it’s not easy to extract from it a prescriptive model that could be used as a criterion for improvement, but utility function (plus prior) seems to be a reasonable format for such a prescriptive model if you manage to construct it somehow.
In that case, we disagree about whether the format seems reasonable (for this purpose).