[EM] range voting, properties with strategic re-voting, and utilitarianism

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 05:56 PM 8/30/2005, Jobst Heitzig wrote:
> > --They understand the system fine.   Range voting is very easy to 
> understand, easier than
> > DMC in fact.  What they do not understand, is utility values!
>
>I guess that's because you cannot easily understand what doesn't exist.

Utility values exist; however, they exist in an abstract world. They 
exist in the same sense that the sum of two numbers on a page exists, 
even if nobody has ever added those numbers together.

People also have an intuitive sense of something like utility value. 
They use it to decide whether or not a product is worth buying at the 
asking price. Utility values are often considered in monetary terms, 
which is problematic, but which at least is a single, often 
specifiable, dimension, which can then be compared.

However, there are utility values, I trust, which are not readily 
expressed in monetary terms, or sometimes the attempt is offensive in 
some way. Many of us have a great reluctance to place a value on, 
say, the life of a pet, to choose a fairly minor example. Yet would 
we willingly spend every penny we could raise or borrow to extend the 
life of that pet? If not, then the "utility value" of the pet must be 
somewhere below the utility value of the assets we would have expended.

Warren is offended, it seems, by a refusal to consider utility 
values. I can sympathize. I see examples in public policy where 
tremendous resources are expended to save, perhaps, a single life, or 
even to avoid a risk to a single life, but then, in different 
circumstances, many lives are lost because the same institutions will 
not spend the same amount of money spread out over many people, to 
avoid deaths due to lack of inexpensive preventive medical care, for 
example. The values are inconsistent. When it comes to spending for 
certain services (such as ambulance service), I have often seen 
arguments in public that the cost doesn't matter. If even one life is 
saved, it will have been worth it.

I think this paradox has been discussed and described by people who 
take interest in such things. There is something about the 
highly-visible dramatic nature of the situations where we will spend 
whatever it takes, that is not there in the everyday needs of people 
struggling to survive; the latter are not newsworthy, and when the 
poor die, it often fails to arouse any public notice at all, beyond 
the bare minimums of recorded statistics.

I think that Mr. Smith's attempt to use utility values is valuable; 
but I also think that sometimes he is less cautious than might be 
warranted in using the concept to propose that this or that path of 
action is clearly better "because of utility values."

Utility values cannot be used for comparisons unless the means of 
determining them for various options and effects are commensurable. 
But the process of attempting to find commensurable procedures is, I 
think, a valuable exercise.

> > Obviously by carrying on this debate you are not directly causing 
> harm to humanity, but
> > your wrong ideas continually do cause tremendous harm to humanity,
>
>You should really stop this or I'll request to put your postings on
>moderation.

Warren's comment was gratuitous and incautiously worded. He really 
should apologize. His error, socially speaking, was in saying "your 
wrong ideas," when what he might legitimately have said would have 
been "ideas such as those you are expressing here," and even then he 
might have been substantially more polite, hedging the statement by 
adding, perhaps, "if I understand you correctly," and "in my 
opinion." But many of us, in this on-line medium, somehow forget the 
social skills that we might have in other contexts. (And a few of us 
simply don't have those skills at all.)

(My comment does not indicate that I agree that the ideas in question 
are harmful. I really haven't examined them in sufficient detail to 
either agree or disagree with that, though I do think that refusal to 
weigh utility values can be harmful in some situations.)

However, we have seen far worse on this list, with not a shred of 
moderator intervention.