Quality Precision
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nobody else can even tell the difference
Won't about 1% of them (10,000 people) be able to tell the difference?
I don't think that is right.
If we ask 100 people which of two ice cream flavors they prefer, and get a 51/49 split, that does not at all imply that 99 people couldn't tell the difference and picked randomly, with the 100th person uniquely able to tell the difference. What we have is only similar to that on a population level. Its not that their is one person who can tell the difference perfectly and many who can't tell the difference at all, but instead many people who can all unreliably tell the difference a little bit.
You take a drug that reduces your chances of heart disease by 1%. You don't get heart disease. You will almost certainly never know if you would have got it without that drug.
You start the thought experiment with this:
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.
I'm assuming you don't mean there is literally no difference between the cases (which would make the answer obvious), but rather that people would be slightly happier in the Q100 case vs. the counterfactual Q99 case. They won't reliably be able to tell the difference, but there would be a small chance of any individual noticing the improvement. Still, if you multiply that epsilon by 1M trials, you get a noticeable effect.
I'm not sure if a barely-noticeable-difference in ice cream flavor is on the order of 1% of the total utility of a serving of ice cream, but I'm pretty confident that even if it was an order of magnitude less, you'd still be better off creating the 1M x 100 world than the (1M + 1) x (100 - ε) world.
Perhaps I am mudding the waters too much. I agree with your logic, and with your conclusions. I agree you are better off taking the option where you serve one less person to increase the total payoff.
What I was trying to say in the original post is that for most things there is the thing itself, and the measurement of the thing. For example maybe noisy thermometers are off from the actual temperature by some random variance. Things feel slightly more suspicious for utility, because the measure of the thing kind of is the thing itself, the split between the actual value and the measured value feels less defensible.
Side note: This seems like a completely different topic from your top level comment. Kind of weird to start a mostly tangential argument inside an unresolved argument thread.
You'd still be better off creating the 1M x 100 world than the (1M + 1) x (100 - ε) world.
- Where does (1M + 1) come from?
- In the post Ben mentions that manufacturer doing hundreds of experiments, not millions. Of course, in the limiting case the smallest quality drop can and will be observed, but I believe Ben is not talking about that.
- Even we use the 1M base figure, it doesn't explain why it is +1 rather than e.g. +1000
- You are assuming that the icecream manufacturer is trying to maximise aggregate utility, which seems obviously false to me.
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Both of my comments were about the thought experiment at the end of the post:
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 fits with part of a larger thing I have where I think that utility doesn't need to be "noticed" to be real
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?
1Curious - 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?
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)
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.
“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.
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.
