Thanks for writing this, but my personal experience of valuing things is a direct contradiction to this. Almost all valuations have some kind of non-linear aggregation. “Declining marginal utility” is observationally and reflectively true for me, at least, and there are many cases outside myself which are more consistent with nonlinear aggregation than linear.
In a lot of cases, the margin is tiny, so it’s hard to notice and not very important. Going from 9 billion to 9.01 or 9.5 billion is close to linear. Going from 0 to 1 or 1 to 2 or 9 to 10 is often VERY different in utility-change.
Thanks for writing this, but my personal experience of valuing things is a direct contradiction to this. Almost all valuations have some kind of non-linear aggregation. “Declining marginal utility” is observationally and reflectively true for me, at least, and there are many cases outside myself which are more consistent with nonlinear aggregation than linear.
In a lot of cases, the margin is tiny, so it’s hard to notice and not very important. Going from 9 billion to 9.01 or 9.5 billion is close to linear. Going from 0 to 1 or 1 to 2 or 9 to 10 is often VERY different in utility-change.