This is a linkpost for https://thewaywardaxolotl.blogspot.com/2025/03/a-critique-of-utility.html
A Critique of “Utility”
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1mako yass
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2the gears to ascension
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2Garrett Baker
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This seems to be a relatively balanced article which discusses serveral concepts of utility with a focus on their problems, while acknowledging some of their use cases. I don't think the downvotes are justified.
2These are not concepts of utility that I've ever seen anyone explicitly espouse, especially not here, the place to which it was posted.
Hedonic and desire theories are perfectly standard, we had plenty of people talking about them here, including myself. Jeffrey's utility theory is explicitly meant to model (beliefs and) desires. Both are also often discussed in ethics, including over at the EA Forum. Daniel Kahneman has written about hedonic utility. To equate money with utility is a common simplification in many economic contexts, where expected utility is actually calculated, e.g. when talking about bets and gambles. Even though it isn't held to be perfectly accurate. I didn't encounter the reproduction and energy interpretations before, but they do make some sense.
Economists and other social theorists often take the concept of utility for granted.
Armchair economists and EAs even more so. Take for granted, and fail to document WHICH version of the utility concept they're using.
For me, utility is a convenient placeholder for the underlying model that our ordinal preferences expressed through action (I did X, meaning I prefer the expected sum of value of outcomes likely from X). Utility is the "value" that is preferred. Note that it's kind of a circular defining - it's the thing that drives decisions, proven by the fact that actions take place.
More expansive uses of the term come about by forgetting that this definition doesn't carry much information about anything. It would be nice if we could find underlying consistent preferences, and this would be a good term for the unification of them. And if they're long-term consistent preferences, maybe it should add up over time to explain time-preferences. And if everyone is equal, then clearly we can sum this thing up to get a group value.
Utility is potentially a good thing to critique, but the case for seems sticky and maybe we're just holding it wrong or something. An issue is that I don't "have" a utility function; the vnm axioms hold in the limit of unexploitability but it seems like the process of getting my mistakes gently corrected by interaction with the universe is itself something I prefer to have some of. In active inference terms, I don't only want to write to the universe.
But this post seems kinda vague too. I upvote hesitantly.
Utility is defined by values, the supreme value being life. I tried to talk about this in my last post and I was downvoted into oblivion.
It does not seem like this writer is aware of the Von Neumann–Morgenstern utility theorem. There are criticisms one can level against utility as a concept, but the central question ends up being which of those axioms do you disagree with and why? For example, Garabrant's Geometric Rationality is a great counter if you're looking for one.
Edit: I notice that all of your previous posts have been of this same format, and they all consistently receive negative karma. You should probably reconsider what you post to this forum.
Furthermore it's pretty basic flaws by LW standards, like the "map/territory" which is the first post in the first sequence. I don't think "discussing basic stuff" is wrong by itself, but doing so by shuttling in someone else's post is sketch, and when that post is also some sort of polemical countered by the first post in the first sequence on LW it starts getting actively annoying.
The people who think of utility in the way the article is critiquing don't know what utility actually is, presenting a critque of this tangible utility as a critique of utility in general takes the target audience further away from understanding what utility is.
A Utility function is a property of a system rather than a physical thing (like, eg, voltage, or inertia, or entropy). Not being a simple physical substance doesn't make it fictional.
It's extremely non-fictional. A human's utility function encompasses literally everything they care about, ie, everything they're willing to kill for.
It seems to be impossible for a human to fully articulate what the human utility function is exactly, but that's just a peculiarity of humans rather than a universal characteristic of utility functions. Other agents could have very simple utility functions, and humans are likely to grow to be able to definitely know their utility function at some point in the next century.
convenient fiction aka a model. Like they almost get this, they just think pointing it out should be done in a really polemical strawmanny "scientists worship their god-models" way.
It's telling they manage to avoid using the word "risk" or "risk-averse" because that's the most obvious example of a time when an economist would realize a simpler form of utility, money, isn't the best model for individual decisions. This isn't a forgivable error when you're convinced you have a more lucid understanding of the model/metaphor status of a science concept than scientists who use it, and it's accessible in econ 101 or even just to common sense.
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