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Most philosophical analyses of human values feature a split-and-linearly-aggregate step. Eg:
Value is the sum (or average) of a person-specific preference function applied to each person
A person's happiness is the sum of their momentary happiness for each moment they're alive.
The goodness of an uncertain future is the probability-weighted sum of the goodness of concrete futures.
If you value multiple orthogonal things, your preferences are the weighted sum of a set of functions that each capture one of those values independently.
I currently think that this is not how human values work, and that many philosophical paradoxes relating to human values trace back to a split-and-linearly-aggregate step like this.
Examples 3 and 1 are justified by the VNM theorm and Harsanyi's utilitarian theorem, respectively. I agree that 2 and 4 are wrong.
1connorf
I like this a lot.
I've been thinking recently about how a lot of my highly-valued experiences have a "fragility" to them, where one big thing missing would make them pretty worthless. In other words, there's a strongly conjunctive aspect. This is pretty clear to everyone in cases like fashion, where you can wear an outfit that looks good aside from clashing with your shoes, or social cases, like if you have a fun party except the guy who relentlessly hits on you is there.
But I think it's underappreciated how widespread this dynamic is. Getting good relaxation in. Having a house that "just works". Having a social event where it "just flows". A song that you like except for the terrible lyrics. A thread that you like but it contains one very bad claim. A job or relationship that goes very well until a bad falling-out at the end.
A related claim, maybe a corollary or maybe separate: lots of good experiences can be multiplicatively enhanced, rather than additively, if you add good things. The canonical example is probably experiencing something profound with your significant other vs without; or something good with your significant other vs something profound.
Seems like it's useful as a very approximate estimate of value to split wrt time, current facets of experience, experiencers, etc, but with so many basic counterexamples it doesn't require much pushing toward edge cases at all before you're getting misleading results.
This post is a container for my short-form writing. See this post for meta-level discussion about shortform.