Utilons vs. Hedons

I will sometimes have an activity rich with hedons available to me, but I will instead watch TV and settle for the meager trickle of hedons it provides.

Is there a time-horizon aspect to this behavior? (That is, can it be explained by saying that highly enjoyable activities with some start-up time are deferred in favor of flopping on the couch and grabbing the remote control?)

This discussion has made me feel I don't understand what "utilon" really means.

I agree that the OP is somewhat ambiguous on this. For my own part, I distinguish between at least the following four categories of things-that-people-might-call-a-utility-function. Each involves a mapping from world histories into the reals according to:

1. how the history affects our mind/emotional states;
2. how we value the history from a self-regarding perspective ("for our own sake");
3. how we value the history from an impartial (moral) perspective; or
4. the choices we would actually make between different world histories (or gambles over world histories).

Hedons are clearly the output of the first mapping. My best guess is that the OP is defining utilons as something like the output of 3, but it may be a broader definition that could also encompass the output of 2, or it could be 4 instead.

I guess that part of the point of rationality is to get the output of 4 to correspond more closely to the output of either 2 or 3 (or maybe something in between): that is to help us act in greater accordance with our values - in either the self-regarding or impartial sense of the term.

"Values" are still a bit of a black box here though, and it's not entirely clear how to cash them out. I don't think we want to reduce them either to actual choices or simply to stated values. Believed values might come closer, but I think we probably still want to allow that we could be mistaken about them.

That definition feels too broad to me. Typically akrasia has two further atttributes:

• Improper time discounting: we don't spend an hour a day exercising even though we believe it would make us lose weight, with a huge hedonic payoff if you maximize hedons over a time horizon of a year.

• Feeling so bad due to not doing the necessary task that we don't really enjoy ourselves no matter what we do instead (and frequently leading to doing nothing for long periods of time). Hedonically, even doing the homework usually feels a lot better (after the first ten minutes) than putting it off, and we know this from experience - but we just can't get started!

Which is why it's pretty blatantly obvious that humans aren't utility maximizers on our native hardware. We're not even contextual utility maximizers; we're state-dependent error minimizers, where what errors we're trying to minimize are based heavily on short-term priming and longer-term time-decayed perceptual averages like "how much relaxation time I've had" or "how much i've gotten done lately".

Consciously and rationally, we can argue we ought to maximize utility, but our behavior and emotions are still controlled by the error-minimizing hardware, to the extent that it motivates all sorts of bizarre rationalizations about utility, trying to force the consciously-appealing idea of utility maximization to contort itself enough to not too badly violate our error-minimizing intuitions. (That is, if we weren't error-minimizers, we wouldn't feel the need to reduce the difference between our intuitive notions of morality, etc. and our more "logical" inclinations.)

Has anybody ever proposed a way to value utilons?

It would be easier to discuss about them if we knew exactly what they can mean, that is, in a more precise way than just by the "unit of utility" definition. For example, how to handle them through time?

So why not defining them with something like that :

Suppose we could precisely measure the level of instant happiness of a person on a linear scale between 1 to 10, with 1 being the worst pain imaginable and 10 the best of climaxes. This level is constantly varying, for everybody. In this context, one utilon could be the value of an action that is increasing the level of happiness of a person by one, on this scale, during one hour.

Then, for example, if you help an old lady to cross the road, making her a bit happier during the next hour (let's say she would have been around 6/10 happy but thanks to you she will be 6,5/10 happy during this hour), then your action has a utility of one half of a utilon. You just created 0.5 utilon, and it's a definitely valid statement, isn't that great?

Using that, a hedon is nothing more than a utilon that we create by raising our own happiness.

This is intriguing, but what if the main indirect cause of death in Africa is overpopulation? Depending on the method by which the life is saved, you might not actually do much good by saving it. It's been touted, for example, that food aid in Africa has been bad for its inhabitants in the long-term. If there is evidence that there are ways to permanently improve conditions to that extent for that cheap, then this would be very compelling.

According to GiveWell, you can save the life of one African person for $200 - $1000.

How reliable is this information?

No; it's fair to say that their utilons are not a linear function of human lives saved.

If you think there are too many people in the world, you might be willing to pay to prevent the saving of lives.

Funny thing is, the only people I know who don't agree that there are too many people in the world, are objectivists, libertarians, and extropians (there's a high correlation between these categories), who are among the least-likely to give money to save people in Africa.

In general industrialized economies have better health, lifespan, standard of living and etc. You seem to be paying attention only to the negative side effects of your manufactured goods.

(That graph is not proof. Correlation is not causation. This is a short comment that makes a small point. Go easy on me.)

disutilon?

Let's try a new card game. Losing isn't death, it's 50 years of torture, followed by death in the most horribly painful way imaginable, for you and everyone you know. We'll say that utility is zero, your current utility is one, and a win doubles your current utility. Do you take the bet?

Or, losing isn't death, it's having to listen to a person scratch a chalkboard for 15 seconds. We'll call that 0, your current situation 1, and a win 2. Do you take the bet?

This is the problem with such scaling. You're defining "double your utility" as "the amount of utility that would make you indifferent to an even-odds bet between X and Y" and then proposing a bet between X and Y where the odds are better than even in your favor. No other definition will consistently yield the results you claim (or at least no other definition type - you could define it the same way but with a different odds threshold). It proves nothing useful.

We need to look at it purely in terms of numbers if we are rationalists, or let us say "ratio-ists". Is your argument really that numeric analysis is the wrong thing to do?

We need to look at it purely in terms of numbers, only if we assume that we're maximizing hedons (or whatever Omega will double). But why should we assume that?

Let's go back to the beginning of this problem. Suppose for simplicity's sake we choose only between playing once, and playing until we die (these two alternatives were the ones discussed the most). In the latter case we die with very high probability, quite soon. Now I, personally, prefer in such a case not to play at all. Why? Well, I just do - it's fundamental to my desires not to want to die in an hour no matter what the gain in happiness during that hour.

This is how I'd actually behave, and I assume many other people as well. I don't have to explain this fact by inventing a utility function that is maximized by not playing. Even if I don't understand myself why I'd choose this, I'm very sure that I would.

Utilons and hedons are models that are supposed to help explain human behavior, but if they don't fit it, it's the models that are wrong. (This is related to the fact that I'm not sure anymore what utilons are exactly, as per my comment above.)

If we were designing a new system to achieve a goal, or even modifying humans towards a given goal, then it might be best to build maximizers of something. But if we're analyzing actual human behavior, which is how the thread about Omega's game got started, there's no reason to assume that humans maximize anything. If we insist on defining human behavior as maximizing hedons (and/or utilons), it follows that hedons do not behave numerically, and so are quite confusing.

Assume you are indifferent towards buying Chocolate Bar A at $1 per bar. How much would you pay for a chocolate bar that is 3.25186 times as delicious? What about one that is 12.35 times as delicious? 2^60 times as delicious? What if you were really, really hungry, so much so that vaguely edible dirt would be delicious. Would that 3.25186 remain significant to 5 decimal places, or might it change slightly?

But if your hedons were measured properly, your inability to imagine them now is not an argument.

It is not an argument; it is evidence. I cannot measure how many hedons I am experiencing now. I can kind of compare it to how many hedons I've experienced at times in the past, but it would be difficult. I certainly couldn't say I'm experiencing 10% less hedonic pleasure than my average day, 20% more than I did yesterday, and 45% less than my happiest day ever. The fact that hedons do not appear to yield to simple quantification is why I cannot imagine doubling my hedons. This fact also suggests that "double your hedons" is not a meaningful, or even possible operation, much as it seems meaningless to say that a chocolate bar is 3.873 times as tasty as another chocolate bar; at best I could say it's better or worse.

I seem to have missed some context for this, I understand that once you've gone down the road of drawing the cards, you have no decision-theoretic reason to stop, but why would I ever draw the first card?

A mere doubling of my current utilons measured against a 10% chance of eliminating all possible future utilons is a sucker's bet. I haven't even hit a third of my expected lifespan given current technology, and my rate of utilon acquisition has been accelerating. Quite aside from the fact that I'm certain my utility function includes terms regarding living a long time, and experiencing certain anticipated future events.

But if your hedons were measured properly, your inability to imagine them now is not an argument. This is Omega we're talking about. Perhaps it will augment your mind to help you reach each doubling. Whatever. It's stipulated in the problem that Omega will double whatever the proper metric is. Futurists should never accept "but I can't imagine that" as an argument.

In ethical and axiological matters, it is an argument.

If Omega alters your mind so that you can experience "doubled utility", and you choose not to identify with the resultant creature, then Omega has killed you.

It's there -- it's the fifth character.

Hedons won't be a subset of utilons if we happen not to value all hedons. One might not value hedons that arise out of false beliefs, for example. (From memory, I think Lawrence Sumner is a proponent of a view something like this.)

NB: Even if hedons were simply a subset of utilons, I don't quite see how that would mean that this post "doesn't really make sense".

In what way are hedons anything other than a subset of utilons?

One need not care about all hedons (or any), or care about them linearly.

What sets? What subsets? You can't throw concepts like this without clarification and expect them to make sense.

To avoid confusion, I think I'm going to refer to Psychohistorian's utilons as valutilons from now on.

Then what's the difference between "pleasure unit" and "experiential utility unit"?

I can think of many other possible reasons that people would oppose drugs other than valuing utilons over hedons. Society might be split into two groups: drug-lovers and non-drug-lovers.

That's why my argument focuses on arguments surrounding legalization rather than on the law itself. There are many potential reasons why drugs remain illegal, from your argument to well-intentioned utilitarianism to big pharma. However, when you look at arguments for legalization, you seldom hear a public figure say, "But people really like getting high!" Similarly, if you're hearing an argument for, say, abstinence-only sex ed, you never hear someone say, "But teenagers really like having sex!" Even with more "neutral" topics like a junk food tax, arguments like "I don't want the government telling me what to eat" seem far more common than "But some people really like deep fried lard!" Though that example I am less sure of, and it is certainly less consistent than the other two. In general though, you don't see people arguing that hedons should be a meaningful factor in any policy, and I think this strongly indicates that our society does not assign a high value to the attaining of of hedons, in the way it assigns value to say, being thin or being wealthy.

For your first example, you claim that you would reject Omega's deal, but this could be for signalling purposes only. If the situation really occurred, who knows whether you would accept?

This is a good objection. I can see another reason why this is a poor example.

Our morals evolved in a society that (to begin with) has no Omegas. If you have an opportunity to hurt a lot of people and profit from it, it's a very safe bet that someone will find out one day that you did it, and you will be punished proportionally. So our instincts (morals, whatever) tell us very strongly not to do this. The proposed secrecy is an added hint (to our subconscious thinking) that this action is not accepted by society, so it's very dangerous.

Rejecting the proposal is unnecessary, excessive caution. If people were more rational, and more serious about maximizing hedons (rather than, say, concentrating on minimizing risk once a suitable lifelong level of hedons has been reached), then more people would accept Omega's proposal!

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