Does this favorite meal include eating it with other people? If my favorite meal alone is 100 utilons, and to define a scale (since you need two points to fully define a scale of utility) a meal of filling gruel is 20 utilons, my favorite meal with friends or family is 200-300 utilons.
Not much of the same duration (about 40 minutes) is worth more than 300 utilons to me. Sex is somewhere around 150-300, dancing is in the 50-150 range, videogames in the 20-100 range, games with friends in the 100-200 range.
Maybe if you gave a list of certain pleasures that interest you, you could get a better list of differences between people.
I am basically interested in anything (in different lists, I only need one common pleasure as reference point). Candidates include food, sex, socialising, hugs & kisses, hobbies, tackling brainteasers, having solved them, playing games (computer or social), visiting museums, reading books, dancing and getting money.
While I'm sure most people here are aware of this, I feel obliged to state for the record that while utility functions produce useful mathematical results, they are, for many practical purposes, terrible models of human preference systems.
Having read other comments, I'll try, of course unsuccessfully, not to anchor...
Good sex = 500
Flirting and foreplay = 400
Dancing "in the zone" = 350
Mathematical intuition/ proving theorem = 300
Drinking water when really thirsty = 250
Listening Mozart's piano concerts in a quiet room = 200
Watching an inspiring movie = 150
Talking with friends = 100
I'm not clear if for your purpose we should plot painful experiences as negative integers...
I don't have a favorite meal, but using a good meal at home as a baseline, having to listen to my upstairs neighbor's dogs yap and fight all day while he's not home is about -250 to -300, going out to eat with a good friend at a nice restaurant runs between 200 and 500 depending on how much energy I have to devote to it and how good of a conversational topic we find, and having a LW comment unexpectedly upvoted runs at about 5 to 10.
Making a complex point clear to a friend in conversation is worth at least 30, and such conversations usually involve other +utility situations as well, plus whatever benefit there is to be gained from having them understand that point. Getting feedback that makes it clear that a friend understands something important about me as a person is also worth at least 30, but can go a lot higher - I'd feel comfortable saying that some of the instances of that I've experienced were worth at least 1000. Perhaps interestingly, making a friend isn't actually worth all that much to me, possibly even 0 - but noticing that I've come to trust someone definitely gets a positive score of at least 50. (Possibly important: Considering someone a friend and trusting them are correlated, for me, but not the same thing. I actually have two separate mental categories for different variants of 'trusted friend'.)
Perhaps interestingly, making a friend isn't actually worth all that much to me, possibly even 0
Wow. That's surprising. Do you just figure you have plenty of friends already or is there more to it?
I actually have two separate mental categories for different variants of 'trusted friend'.
That one I understand. I perhaps hadn't gone as far as to invoke a 'trusted friend' label but there were certainly different categories.
I may be using a slightly nonstandard definition of 'friend'. People I only interact with as part of a social group count as acquaintances*, not friends, and I do find such groups to be valuable. Someone goes from 'acquaintance' to 'friend' when I find myself interested in spending time with them personally, and while being moved to that group can be taken as a compliment, it's generally net-neutral for me - I'm introverted enough that maintaining relationships with people who've passed that bar but who haven't passed the first 'trusted friend' bar is actually about neutral cost/benefit-wise most of the time. (This does vary, but usually I find out that someone is unusually good as a friend well after I've started considering them one, and I don't assume it's going to be the case.) Passing the first 'trusted friend' bar, on the other hand, is a pretty big deal, and passing the second is even bigger, but also very rare.
* Strictly speaking, I consider someone an acquaintance when I reliably recognize them as an individual, which is nontrivial, so most groups that I socialize with consist of some mixture of acquaintances and strangers with possibly a few people from the other categories mixed in.
I would like to know what value of utility you would give to certain kinds of pleasure in order to see how much the perceived ratios are differing between people. Of course, you can object that the real amount of pleasure someone experiences may be different from the pleasure she will recall; furthermore, pleasure is not a scalar, and it is a question of definition of someones' utility function how much she would want to have different kinds of pleasure; furthermore, there are effects of diminishing returns. However, you probably can get some orders of magnitude out of this.
Let's define your favorite meal, one time, when you are hungry but not "starving to death" as one hundred utilium (You see this is pretty heuristical).
You can include painful experiences, too.