Quality Precision

This is one of the reasons I object to utilitarianism. There's no actual measure of utility. This isn't just that it's inconsistent in whether I notice it, or even that it's inconsistent in which things I prefer at a given moment (though both are true). It's that it's so inconsistent across time and across individuals that it's very hard to believe that it's actually quantifiable at all.

Utility as an instantaneous ordinal preference, revealed by choice, is extremely well-supported. Utility as a quantity is far more useful for calculations, but far less justifiable by observation. Heck, most utilitarians can't even tell me whether it's a stock or a flow - do you save/spend utility, or just maximize each second's utility value?

[-]dr_s6d20

Curious - I know ordinal arithmetic exists though I'm no expert. Are there any theory of utilitarianism developed with that or similar exotic algebras that you know of?

[-]homosapien976d10

Edit: On re-read, I think I misinterpreted what you were saying, and most of what I wrote is not relevant--my actual question is "why is pairwise ranking of events/states/choices not sufficient to quantify utility?".

The inconsistency across time and individuals in evaluating marginal differences in utility does not necessarily preclude utility from being quantifiable.

In the extreme, almost everyone would, given the choice between "eternal happiness, fulfillment, and freedom for me and everyone I care about" and "the less desirable between eternal torture our oblivion for me and everyone I care about", choose the former. It seems reasonable then to say that the former has higher utility to them than the latter. Given such a starting point, the utility of further events can be approximately quantified by ranking. You may (reasonably) conclude that you don't care about imperceptible differences in utility without throwing away the concept of quantifiable utility in general.

Have I misinterpreted what you meant by "Utility as an instantaneous ordinal preference, revealed by choice, is extremely well-supported. Utility as a quantity is far more useful for calculations, but far less justifiable by observation" ? Is pairwise (approximate) ranking of choices not sufficient to quantify utility?

(P.S. Utilitarianism is not actually my foremost moral axiom, but quantification of utility does not seem incoherent to me)

[-]Joachim Bartosik6d40

This situation puzzles me. On the one hand, I feel a strong logical compulsion to the first (higher total utility) option. The fact that the difference is unresolvable for each person doesn't seem that worrying at a glance, because obviously on a continuous scale resolvable differences are made out of many unresolvable differences added together.
On the other hand, how can I say someone enjoys one thing more than another if they can't even tell the difference? If we were looking at the lengths of strings then one could in fact be longer than another, even if our ruler lacked the precision to see it. But utility is different, we don't care about the abstract "quality" of the experience, only how much it is enjoyed. Enjoyment happens in the mind, and if the mind can't tell the difference, then there isn't one.

It seems to me like your own post answers this question?

Any individual is unlikely to notice the difference, but if we treat those like ELO[1] ChatGPT tells me ELO 100 wins 50.14% of the time. Which is not a lot, but with 1 mllion people thats on average some 2800 people more saying they prefer 100 option than 99 option.

[1] Which might not be right, expected utility sounds like we want to add and average utility numbers and it's not obvious to me to do stuff like averaging ELO.

[-]quanticle6d30

“Proper” mashed potatoes with butter are an obviously superior dish to microwaved instant mash with margarine, but over a lifetime someone can move from the former to the latter in steps small enough to barely notice.

Isn't this also known as "normalization of deviance"? At each step, the results are "close enough" or "good enough", and without someone stepping back occasionally and looking back at the original standard, the results can diverge arbitrarily from what is intended.

[-]FlorianH6d10

You motivate the discussion by a comparison by two near-identical products.

In reality, even in your examples, what would matter is more the absolute judgement of quality (or comparison to entirely different alternatives).

I think thus even your slippery slope type Ice Cream ingredients dynamics mostly doesn't happen that way.

Example Ice Cream: If you want to sell ice cram you'd like for most people to like it as much as possible (trading off with input costs, of course). And even the tiny drop in quality has its corresponding probability for one consumer here and there to eventually not buy your ice cram anymore. And as manufacturer you'll obviously consider that (barring any principle agent where you as contracted manufacturer are trying to trick the actual owner, which may well happen).^[1]

Similarly this can be said to apply in +- any realistic utility scenario, barely leaving any room for the supposed puzzle you bring

^{^}
Note this does not mean we don't have suboptimal quality. But that's not primarily linked to any supposed 'slow but near-continuous decline' dynamics I'd expect.

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24 Quality Precision

by Ben

25th Aug 2025

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[-]Measure6d91

nobody else can even tell the difference

Won't about 1% of them (10,000 people) be able to tell the difference?

[-]Dagon6d50

This fits with part of a larger thing I have where I think that utility doesn't need to be "noticed" to be real

[-]dr_s6d20

Curious - I know ordinal arithmetic exists though I'm no expert. Are there any theory of utilitarianism developed with that or similar exotic algebras that you know of?

[-]homosapien976d10

The inconsistency across time and individuals in evaluating marginal differences in utility does not necessarily preclude utility from being quantifiable.

(P.S. Utilitarianism is not actually my foremost moral axiom, but quantification of utility does not seem incoherent to me)

[-]Joachim Bartosik6d40

This situation puzzles me. On the one hand, I feel a strong logical compulsion to the first (higher total utility) option. The fact that the difference is unresolvable for each person doesn't seem that worrying at a glance, because obviously on a continuous scale resolvable differences are made out of many unresolvable differences added together.
On the other hand, how can I say someone enjoys one thing more than another if they can't even tell the difference? If we were looking at the lengths of strings then one could in fact be longer than another, even if our ruler lacked the precision to see it. But utility is different, we don't care about the abstract "quality" of the experience, only how much it is enjoyed. Enjoyment happens in the mind, and if the mind can't tell the difference, then there isn't one.

It seems to me like your own post answers this question?

[1] Which might not be right, expected utility sounds like we want to add and average utility numbers and it's not obvious to me to do stuff like averaging ELO.

[-]quanticle6d30

“Proper” mashed potatoes with butter are an obviously superior dish to microwaved instant mash with margarine, but over a lifetime someone can move from the former to the latter in steps small enough to barely notice.

[-]FlorianH6d10

You motivate the discussion by a comparison by two near-identical products.

In reality, even in your examples, what would matter is more the absolute judgement of quality (or comparison to entirely different alternatives).

I think thus even your slippery slope type Ice Cream ingredients dynamics mostly doesn't happen that way.

Similarly this can be said to apply in +- any realistic utility scenario, barely leaving any room for the supposed puzzle you bring

^{^}
Note this does not mean we don't have suboptimal quality. But that's not primarily linked to any supposed 'slow but near-continuous decline' dynamics I'd expect.

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Ice Cream Elo

Lets say that normal-quality ice cream is 100 points of enjoyable in some arbitrary units. You, as the consumer of the ice cream, do not have perfect precision.

In a single-shot test, you can tell that 100 is better than 80.
In a blind test, you will favor 100 over 90 with a high probability, but not 100%.
It would take hundreds of blind taste trials, each time asking "which was better" for you to differentiate 100 from 99.

To put this another way, we can think of the ice-cream quality numbers a bit like chess Elo ratings. An ice cream that "beats" (is preferred over) another with 51% probability is better, but it would take a lot of tests to show it.

I will just assume here that everyone has the same tastes, to make the point more clearly. Obviously in real life some people like some things, and others like other things, but that is not what this post is about.

Sawtooth Wave of Compromise and correction

So far I have just argued for the obvious, that noticeable differences in quality are comprised of many un-noticeable differences added together. What consequences does this imply?

One consequence, is a kind of compromise slope. A manufacturer is wondering whether to use a different sweetener in their ice cream (eg. corn syrup vs. cane sugar). The new sweetener is cheaper. The ice cream quality drops from 100 to 98. But the customers can't tell, and even the manufacturer might not be able to. So the change goes through with nobody noticing.

Months pass. The manufacturer is looking at a new preservative, Q98 drops to Q96. Vanilla is expensive, some kind of beaver-derived alternative is used to replace some of it (Q94),... things continue until we arrive at Q90. Then, a rival ice-cream maker arrives on the scene, selling quality 100 ice cream. Nearly everyone can tell it is better than the Q90 stuff and some customers move to the up-market product.

Essentially, the model is predicting that compromises in quality will happen in many small steps. But upward corrections will happen in discrete jumps. There is little point in improving your product by an increment too small for consumers to notice.

This idea originally came as a way to explain a pattern I observed in my own cooking. I was reminded of it recently by an Astral Codex review of mashed potatoes ^[1]. "Proper" mashed potatoes with butter are an obviously superior dish to microwaved instant mash with margarine, but over a lifetime someone can move from the former to the latter in steps small enough to barely notice.

The artist at work

An expert (or artist) is able to spot the positive impact of small changes that others might miss, and can chain them together for a total gain that is obvious to even a non-specialist. Specialists will have many skills non-specialists lack, but this is one.

I once had the chance to play with LaTeX settings for a document with someone more skilled than me in making documents look good. They only made 5 or 6 changes to the font/margins etc, and most of those changes (so me) didn't produce a noticeable improvement. But, a before/after comparison with all the changes was striking, those small changes had really added up. Across several domains I have found that people more experienced will make certain actions, that to me (the less experienced) don't seem to really add much, if anything. But, in time, those add up.

It can be interesting to put something obviously bad next to something obviously good, and try and work out what the set of (possibly small) differences are that are doing the work ^[2].

Utilitarian on unobserved margins

Lets say people can't actually tell the difference (in a one-shot trial) between experiencing 100 utility points of goodness, and only 99 utility points. You are given a moral dilemma, either a million people will get an experience worth 100 utility points each, or a million + 1 people will get 99 utility points each. The first option gets you more utility total, but if we take the second option we get one more person served and nobody else can even tell the difference.

This situation puzzles me. On the one hand, I feel a strong logical compulsion to the first (higher total utility) option. The fact that the difference is unresolvable for each person doesn't seem that worrying at a glance, because obviously on a continuous scale resolvable differences are made out of many unresolvable differences added together.

On the other hand, how can I say someone enjoys one thing more than another if they can't even tell the difference? If we were looking at the lengths of strings then one could in fact be longer than another, even if our ruler lacked the precision to see it. But utility is different, we don't care about the abstract "quality" of the experience, only how much it is enjoyed. Enjoyment happens in the mind, and if the mind can't tell the difference, then there isn't one.

Overall, I think I would take the first choice. This fits with part of a larger thing I have where I think that utility doesn't need to be "noticed" to be real ^[3].

^{^}
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-my-fathers-instant-mashed
^{^}
Compare: https://www.gettyimages.co.uk/detail/news-photo/1990s-passengers-on-board-a-london-underground-train-at-news-photo/1074411198 , and https://cdn.britannica.com/49/127149-050-0C1C9430/train-subway-station-London-Underground.jpg
^{^}
This is a confused idea at the moment, but it mostly comes from the fact that I sometimes realize that something has been annoying me for ages, but I didn't previously notice it consciously. The most extreme example of this for me is sometimes I am trying to read from my screen, then notice my vision is fuzzy in the middle, and only then do I notice that I have been experiencing a really painful migraine for over an hour. It seems paradoxical to say I was in pain, and that was bad, even though I didn't know it, but that seems the best description of the situation I can find. Once I realize I have a headache I can often identify actions that I took in response to the migraine (procrastinating, skipping my afternoon cup of tea, adjusting my screen brightness repeatedly), but when I took those actions I was in pain, but wasn't yet aware I was in pain. If I am with someone I know well, they often notice I have a headache before I do.