To see if I understand this right, I’ll try to look at (in)adequacy in terms of utility maximization.
The systems that we looked at can be seen as having utility functions. Sometimes the utility function is explicitly declared by creators of the system but more often it’s implicit in its design or just assumed by an observer. For markets it will be some combination of ease of trade, adjacenty of price in sell and buy offers, etc., for academia—the amount of useful scientific progress per dollar, for medicine—amount of saved and improved lives (appropriately weighted) per dollar, and so forth.
We might have different (or nonexistent) precise definitions of the utility functions, but we all agree that “saving ten thousand lives for just ten dollars each” increases medicine’s utility value and completing modestly priced research that has great benefit for humanity increases academia’s utility value.
Then the adequacy of the system is the ability of the system to maximize its utility value. And lack of such ability is inadequacy. It might also make sense to talk in comparatives: system A is more adequate than system B at maximizing utility function F, system A is more adequate at maximizing F1 than it is an maximizing F2.
I see the following possible reasons for inadequacy:
The system in its current state maximizes a different function than what its creators intended (in other words it’s not aligned with the intention of its creators),
The observer has a different idea about the implied or intended utility function or misunderstands how things work.
The system maximizes what we want but does it poorly.
The system is not rational and doesn’t consistently maximize any utility function (and perhaps the creators, if any, didn’t have anything precise in mind in the first place).
In real world systems we usually see a combination of all of these reasons. Technically, (4) would rule out the other options, but insofar that (4) might be indistinguishable from maximizing utility imperfectly, they could still apply.
I know this sounds quite imprecise compared to typical utility maximization talk but I think it would be a non-trivial amount of work to define things more precisely. Does this seem to go in the right direction though?
To see if I understand this right, I’ll try to look at (in)adequacy in terms of utility maximization.
The systems that we looked at can be seen as having utility functions. Sometimes the utility function is explicitly declared by creators of the system but more often it’s implicit in its design or just assumed by an observer. For markets it will be some combination of ease of trade, adjacenty of price in sell and buy offers, etc., for academia—the amount of useful scientific progress per dollar, for medicine—amount of saved and improved lives (appropriately weighted) per dollar, and so forth.
We might have different (or nonexistent) precise definitions of the utility functions, but we all agree that “saving ten thousand lives for just ten dollars each” increases medicine’s utility value and completing modestly priced research that has great benefit for humanity increases academia’s utility value.
Then the adequacy of the system is the ability of the system to maximize its utility value. And lack of such ability is inadequacy. It might also make sense to talk in comparatives: system A is more adequate than system B at maximizing utility function F, system A is more adequate at maximizing F1 than it is an maximizing F2.
I see the following possible reasons for inadequacy:
The system in its current state maximizes a different function than what its creators intended (in other words it’s not aligned with the intention of its creators),
The observer has a different idea about the implied or intended utility function or misunderstands how things work.
The system maximizes what we want but does it poorly.
The system is not rational and doesn’t consistently maximize any utility function (and perhaps the creators, if any, didn’t have anything precise in mind in the first place).
In real world systems we usually see a combination of all of these reasons. Technically, (4) would rule out the other options, but insofar that (4) might be indistinguishable from maximizing utility imperfectly, they could still apply.
I know this sounds quite imprecise compared to typical utility maximization talk but I think it would be a non-trivial amount of work to define things more precisely. Does this seem to go in the right direction though?