I was pretty convinced for commensurability and thought cognitive biases would just introduce noise, but lack of success by me, and apparently by everyone else in this thread, changed my mind quite significantly.
Not knowing how to commensurate things doesn’t imply they’re incommensurable (though obviously, the fact that people have difficulty with this sort of thing is interesting in its own right).
As a (slight) aside, I’m still unclear about what you think would count as “success” here.
It’s not a hard implication, but it’s a pretty strong evidence against existence of traditional utility functions.
A success would be a list of events or states of reality and their weights, such that you’re pretty convinced that your preferences are reasonably consistent with this list, so that you know how many hours of standing in queues is losing 5kg worth and how much money is having one thousand extra readers of your blog worth.
It doesn’t sound like much, but I completely fail as soon as it goes out of very narrow domain, I’m surprised by this failure, and I’m surprised that others fail at this too.
I’m surprised at your surprise. Even granting that humans could possibly be innately reflectively self-consistent, there’s a huge curse of dimensionality problem in specifying the damn thing. ETA: The problem with the dimensionality is that interactions between the dimensions abound; ceteris paribus assumptions can’t get you very far at all.
I was pretty convinced for commensurability and thought cognitive biases would just introduce noise, but lack of success by me, and apparently by everyone else in this thread, changed my mind quite significantly.
Not knowing how to commensurate things doesn’t imply they’re incommensurable (though obviously, the fact that people have difficulty with this sort of thing is interesting in its own right).
As a (slight) aside, I’m still unclear about what you think would count as “success” here.
It’s not a hard implication, but it’s a pretty strong evidence against existence of traditional utility functions.
A success would be a list of events or states of reality and their weights, such that you’re pretty convinced that your preferences are reasonably consistent with this list, so that you know how many hours of standing in queues is losing 5kg worth and how much money is having one thousand extra readers of your blog worth.
It doesn’t sound like much, but I completely fail as soon as it goes out of very narrow domain, I’m surprised by this failure, and I’m surprised that others fail at this too.
I’m surprised at your surprise. Even granting that humans could possibly be innately reflectively self-consistent, there’s a huge curse of dimensionality problem in specifying the damn thing. ETA: The problem with the dimensionality is that interactions between the dimensions abound; ceteris paribus assumptions can’t get you very far at all.
I was expecting noise, and maybe a few iterations before reaching satisfying results, but it seems we cannot even get that much, and it surprises me.