Utility is not a resource. In the usual expected utility setting, utility functions don’t care about affine transformations (all decisions remain the same), for example decreasing all utilities by 1000 doesn’t change anything, and there is no significance to utility being positive vs. negative. So requirements to have at least five units of utility in order to play a round of a game shouldn’t make sense.
In this post, there is a resource whose utility could maybe possibly be given by the identity function. But in that case it could also be given by the “times two minus 87” utility function and lead to the same decisions. It’s not really clear that utility is identity, since a 50⁄50 lottery between ending up with zero or ten units of the resource seems much worse than the certainty of obtaining five units. (“If you’re Elliott, [zero] is a super scary result to imagine.”)
Not 100% sure I got all the points in this comment, but my sense is that the overall meta-point was that the framing (in particular in the quoted section?) of the Stag Hunt wasn’t formalized properly (i.e. conflating resource with utility).
Do you have a suggestion for an improved wording, optimized for being accessible to non-technical people? (maybe just replacing “utility” with “resources” since I think that’s a more accurate read on the particular way Duncan was framing it)
There’s also a question that may be useful of when it’s actually accurate for “real life stag hunts” to actually “cost resources.” In the example I gave, there *is* a resource that’d need to be spent to achieve good conversational norms, but admittedly the stag hunt frame doesn’t really map onto it that well (since it’s not like different players had different amounts of resource, it was more like they had different beliefs about how valuable it was for the team to spend a particular resource)
Sure, any resource would do (like copper coins needed to pay for maintenance of equipment), or just generic “units of resources”. My concern is that the term “utility” is used incorrectly in an otherwise excellent post that is tangentially related to the topic where its technical meaning matters, potentially propagating this popular misreading.
Utility is not a resource. In the usual expected utility setting, utility functions don’t care about affine transformations (all decisions remain the same), for example decreasing all utilities by 1000 doesn’t change anything, and there is no significance to utility being positive vs. negative. So requirements to have at least five units of utility in order to play a round of a game shouldn’t make sense.
In this post, there is a resource whose utility could maybe possibly be given by the identity function. But in that case it could also be given by the “times two minus 87” utility function and lead to the same decisions. It’s not really clear that utility is identity, since a 50⁄50 lottery between ending up with zero or ten units of the resource seems much worse than the certainty of obtaining five units. (“If you’re Elliott, [zero] is a super scary result to imagine.”)
Not 100% sure I got all the points in this comment, but my sense is that the overall meta-point was that the framing (in particular in the quoted section?) of the Stag Hunt wasn’t formalized properly (i.e. conflating resource with utility).
Do you have a suggestion for an improved wording, optimized for being accessible to non-technical people? (maybe just replacing “utility” with “resources” since I think that’s a more accurate read on the particular way Duncan was framing it)
There’s also a question that may be useful of when it’s actually accurate for “real life stag hunts” to actually “cost resources.” In the example I gave, there *is* a resource that’d need to be spent to achieve good conversational norms, but admittedly the stag hunt frame doesn’t really map onto it that well (since it’s not like different players had different amounts of resource, it was more like they had different beliefs about how valuable it was for the team to spend a particular resource)
Sure, any resource would do (like copper coins needed to pay for maintenance of equipment), or just generic “units of resources”. My concern is that the term “utility” is used incorrectly in an otherwise excellent post that is tangentially related to the topic where its technical meaning matters, potentially propagating this popular misreading.
I replaced the term with ‘resource’ for now. (I think it’s sort of important for it to showcase ‘genericness’)
Thanks!