(This might seem obviously stupid to someone who’s thought about the issue more in-depth, but if so there’s no better place for it than the Stupid Questions Thread, is there?):
and I don’t know what evidence I could reasonably expect for or against #3.
I think some tangential evidence could be gleaned, as long as it’s understood as a very noisy signal, from what other humans in your society consider as signals of social involvement and productivity. Namely, how well your daughter is doing at school, how engaged she gets with her peers, her results in tests, etc. These things are known, or at least thought, to be correlated with social ‘success’ and ‘benefit’.
Basically, if your daughter is raising the averages or other scores that comprise the yardsticks of teachers and other institutions, then this is information correlated with what others consider being beneficial to society later in life. (the exact details of the correlation, including its direction, depend on the specific environment she lives in)
That would be evidence (albeit, as you say, not very strong evidence) that my daughter’s contribution to net utility is above average. That doesn’t seem enough to guarantee it’s positive.
Good catch. Didn’t notice that one sneaking in there. That kind of invalidates most of my reasoning, so I’ll retract it willingly unless someone has an insight that saves the idea.
(This might seem obviously stupid to someone who’s thought about the issue more in-depth, but if so there’s no better place for it than the Stupid Questions Thread, is there?):
I think some tangential evidence could be gleaned, as long as it’s understood as a very noisy signal, from what other humans in your society consider as signals of social involvement and productivity. Namely, how well your daughter is doing at school, how engaged she gets with her peers, her results in tests, etc. These things are known, or at least thought, to be correlated with social ‘success’ and ‘benefit’.
Basically, if your daughter is raising the averages or other scores that comprise the yardsticks of teachers and other institutions, then this is information correlated with what others consider being beneficial to society later in life. (the exact details of the correlation, including its direction, depend on the specific environment she lives in)
That would be evidence (albeit, as you say, not very strong evidence) that my daughter’s contribution to net utility is above average. That doesn’t seem enough to guarantee it’s positive.
Good catch. Didn’t notice that one sneaking in there. That kind of invalidates most of my reasoning, so I’ll retract it willingly unless someone has an insight that saves the idea.