While it’s admittedly not that related to this problem, where it’s mostly pretty clear what’s meant, I’d like to also express my annoyance regarding the use of utils. Given a utility function U, the individual numbers U(A), U(B), etc., are not actually meaningful. Better would be [things that can be expressed in terms of] differences in utility, U(B)-U(A). However really all that’s actually meaningful are [things that can be expressed in terms of] things of the form (U(B)-U(A))/(U(C)-U(A)). We really need to be a lot more careful with our uses of this.
While it’s admittedly not that related to this problem, where it’s mostly pretty clear what’s meant, I’d like to also express my annoyance regarding the use of utils. Given a utility function U, the individual numbers U(A), U(B), etc., are not actually meaningful. Better would be [things that can be expressed in terms of] differences in utility, U(B)-U(A). However really all that’s actually meaningful are [things that can be expressed in terms of] things of the form (U(B)-U(A))/(U(C)-U(A)). We really need to be a lot more careful with our uses of this.