Hmm. What I was intending to do there was capture the idea that a bill failing to pass is the default state, and I’m only interested in the difference between a bill passing and a bill failing. So the utility score of a bill passing is supposed to represent the difference between it getting passed vs nothing happening.
Does that make sense? Am I just using utility terminology in a confusing way?
Pinning the utility of a failed bill to 0 for all agents gets rid of some free parameters in the model, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the complete way to do so (you still have enough free parameters that you could do more).
What do we get from using the utility per bill framework?
We enforce that the combined desirability of a bill portfolio can only depend on the sum of the individual desirabilities of the bills.
We allow MPs to price gambles between bills.
It’s not clear to me that the second is going to be useful (do they have access to a source of randomness and binding commitments?), and it’s not clear to me that the first is a requirement we actually want to impose. Suppose B1 is something like “cows are people” and B2 is something like “we shouldn’t eat people.” A MP who is against eating humans but for eating cows will flip their opinion on B2 based on the (expected) outcome of B1.
So then it seems like we should assign values to portfolios (i.e. bitstrings of whether or not bills passed), and if we don’t need probabilistic interpretations then we should deal with ordinal rankings of those bitstrings that allow indifference, which would look like (01>11>10=00). A perhaps inaccessible way to talk about those rankings is sets of permutations of bitstrings (the previous ranking is <(01,11,10,00),(01,11,00,10)>).
That’s a good suggestion about the allowing the MP’s assign utilities to portfolios. I went with the per bill framework because I thought it was simpler, and was trying to find the simplest formalization I could that would capture the interesting parts of the parliamentary model.
But perhaps dependence of bills on each other (or in the real world of actions that one’s moral parliament might take on each other) might be a key feature?
It might be interesting to see if we can analyze both models.
Hmm. What I was intending to do there was capture the idea that a bill failing to pass is the default state, and I’m only interested in the difference between a bill passing and a bill failing. So the utility score of a bill passing is supposed to represent the difference between it getting passed vs nothing happening.
Does that make sense? Am I just using utility terminology in a confusing way?
Pinning the utility of a failed bill to 0 for all agents gets rid of some free parameters in the model, but it’s not clear to me that it’s the complete way to do so (you still have enough free parameters that you could do more).
What do we get from using the utility per bill framework?
We enforce that the combined desirability of a bill portfolio can only depend on the sum of the individual desirabilities of the bills.
We allow MPs to price gambles between bills.
It’s not clear to me that the second is going to be useful (do they have access to a source of randomness and binding commitments?), and it’s not clear to me that the first is a requirement we actually want to impose. Suppose B1 is something like “cows are people” and B2 is something like “we shouldn’t eat people.” A MP who is against eating humans but for eating cows will flip their opinion on B2 based on the (expected) outcome of B1.
So then it seems like we should assign values to portfolios (i.e. bitstrings of whether or not bills passed), and if we don’t need probabilistic interpretations then we should deal with ordinal rankings of those bitstrings that allow indifference, which would look like (01>11>10=00). A perhaps inaccessible way to talk about those rankings is sets of permutations of bitstrings (the previous ranking is <(01,11,10,00),(01,11,00,10)>).
That’s a good suggestion about the allowing the MP’s assign utilities to portfolios. I went with the per bill framework because I thought it was simpler, and was trying to find the simplest formalization I could that would capture the interesting parts of the parliamentary model.
But perhaps dependence of bills on each other (or in the real world of actions that one’s moral parliament might take on each other) might be a key feature?
It might be interesting to see if we can analyze both models.