...actually, now that I think about it some more, I agree that there is something to your line of thinking; I’m just not certain it leads to the conclusion you suggest.
The problem is that we don’t have any way of talking about this that intuitively prompts how it actually works, and “degrees utility” is problematic because it suggests it accounts for all the problems. OK. However, the thing is, so does “utils”. I mean, it’s possible that people see that and know to tread carefully; I don’t have any data here. I just feel like I’ve seen people try to add 1 util and 1 util often enough that I suspect that that isn’t the case, and that most people do read “utils” as indicating that it is correct to treat it as an amount of stuff.
But perhaps reverting to an even worse solution would suggest to tread carefully—namely, bare numbers. Again, this is pure speculation, I have no data; but I get the feeling that bare numbers will raise people’s hackles more than “utils”. Bare numbers suggest “something’s been left out here; tread carefully”; using a unit suggests “yes, this is a sensible way to measure it.”
So, if I’m correct about that, “utils” actually seems like the worst suggestion of the three—compared to “degrees utility”, it’s more misleading, but doesn’t come with an additional warning sign; compared to a bare number, it lacks the obvious warning sign, and isn’t that much more misleading. (Because adding and scaling will be the most tempting meaningless things to do anyway; multiplication seems a bit more exotic...)
...actually, now that I think about it some more, I agree that there is something to your line of thinking; I’m just not certain it leads to the conclusion you suggest.
The problem is that we don’t have any way of talking about this that intuitively prompts how it actually works, and “degrees utility” is problematic because it suggests it accounts for all the problems. OK. However, the thing is, so does “utils”. I mean, it’s possible that people see that and know to tread carefully; I don’t have any data here. I just feel like I’ve seen people try to add 1 util and 1 util often enough that I suspect that that isn’t the case, and that most people do read “utils” as indicating that it is correct to treat it as an amount of stuff.
But perhaps reverting to an even worse solution would suggest to tread carefully—namely, bare numbers. Again, this is pure speculation, I have no data; but I get the feeling that bare numbers will raise people’s hackles more than “utils”. Bare numbers suggest “something’s been left out here; tread carefully”; using a unit suggests “yes, this is a sensible way to measure it.”
So, if I’m correct about that, “utils” actually seems like the worst suggestion of the three—compared to “degrees utility”, it’s more misleading, but doesn’t come with an additional warning sign; compared to a bare number, it lacks the obvious warning sign, and isn’t that much more misleading. (Because adding and scaling will be the most tempting meaningless things to do anyway; multiplication seems a bit more exotic...)