I just started reading the Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman. I find the beginning section very well made and convincing. As in this is easily material that could be given to an intellectual person and have him understand it and possibly agree with it. Perhaps some buttering up beforehand would help, but the book (besides its too-early mention of anarcho-capitalism) is pretty solid and gives nice utilitarian arguments for AnCap (even for a semi-deontologist like me).
Thoughts?
Oh, and in case Friedman sees this post with his uberbots crawling the web, thanks! (though I disagree with you on utility comparisons )
I enjoyed one of his novels and a couple of his short articles, but I’ve never read any of his nonfiction books. Sounds like it’s about time to learn what he has to say. So far I like it very much. Some other people have written similar observations, but he is very observant and has a great writing style.
The writing is certainly extremely easy to read. Yet the more I read of his mainstream welfare economics approach in the book the more ticked off I am. It goes against the foundations of Austrian thought.
“Oh, and in case Friedman sees this post with his uberbots crawling the web, thanks! (though I disagree with you on utility comparisons”
You think interpersonal utility is entirely incomparable? You have no opinion at all as to whether you would suffer more disutility from being tortured to death than I would from a cold shower?
But isn’t this better understood as an intuitive theory of human nature?
One of the essential things about choosing is that my choices happen in my head. Hence, if a sadist offers you the alternative to suffer a cold shower or watch me be tortured to death, it is not literally the expectation of my suffering that impels your choice but, rather, your own anticipated feelings of sympathetic pain, lifelong guilt, and failure to fulfill your own moral self-image that impels you to undergo the suffering of a cold shower to spare me. And this account of choice should not be understood in any normative sense, it is merely descriptive of the actual causal factors that drive your choice. It is a matter of fact that you will not feel my torture. Only I will feel it because only I am me. Hence, there is a significant difference between choosing whether to undergo a shower or watch me be tortured to death and choosing whether to undergo a shower or be tortured to death yourself.
I’ve written about the first 2/3 of the sequel, but have been stalled at that point for quite a while.
One of the protagonists is Eirick, Lord Iolen’s son, stranded in Forstmark at about age 10 by the death of his father. As Mari remarks at one point in the book, he is a much nicer person than his father.
You might almost suspect that I’m not an Austrian.
Isn’t the more relevant question whether it’s right?
Well, yes, I know you’re not Austrian
You think interpersonal utility is entirely incomparable? You have no opinion at all as to whether you would suffer more disutility from being tortured to death than I would from a cold shower?
You cannot compare the utilities of other people. When you have to make the decision between eating an apple and giving it to a homeless person you compare your expectation of their utility (given your own utility for apples and your understanding of their tastes) discounted by how much you care about them against your utility gained from eating an apple. [Edit: this is unclear. Let me clarify: the imporant thing here is the discount, not the expectation, so maybe the beginning of the sentence should be inverted - you’re comparing how much you care about their utilities to how much you care about your own utilites, and the care for their utility is informed by their possible reaction to being given an apple]
Wouldn’t you say that making external comparisons of utilities relies on cardinal utilities? Internal comparisons rely on a natural funciton of the brain which creates our ordinal utilities. Even if we could have a function which gives us the exact utlity orderings of other people, we would still be left with two ranked but non-cardinal schedules that would need to be merged, which is even theoretically impossible.
Then you’re left with the option of accepting cardinal utility calculation. This means that we need to define a 0 utility and a +1 increase in utility. I am open to suggestions where you want to define the 0 and what a +1 increase means. Furthermore, I highly suspect that utility itself is not a value that can be added up over time and hence be accumulated. Instead, it’s merely a function that exists at the moment to help make decisions based on satisfaction and expected satisfaction.
To return to your original example,
You have no opinion at all as to whether you would suffer more disutility from being tortured to death than I would from a cold shower
I have a very strong opinion about my utility if I have to be tortured to death and my utility from choosing for you to take a cold shower instead.
“Wouldn’t you say that making external comparisons of utilities relies on cardinal utilities?”
No–although I have no objection to cardinal utilities.
"Internal comparisons rely on a natural funciton of the brain which creates our ordinal utilities. Even if we could have a function which gives us the exact utlity orderings of other people, we would still be left with two ranked but non-cardinal schedules that would need to be merged, which is even theoretically impossible.
Then you’re left with the option of accepting cardinal utility calculation. This means that we need to define a 0 utility and a +1 increase in utility. I am open to suggestions where you want to define the 0 and what a +1 increase means."
You might want to look at the work of John Von Neumann, who solved that particular problem quite a long time ago. He showed that if individual choices under uncertainty met some fairly simple consistency conditions, cardinal utility was implied by choices up to linear transformations.
That doesn’t say where the zero point is–I think there is much to be said for defining it as the suicide point. And it doesn’t say what the unit is–but then, units are essentially arbitrary for most cardinal measures, no reason why Centigrade is more natural than Fahrenheit, or vice versa. But the statement “I value A more than B by twice as much as I value A more than C” turns out to be a meaningful statement, whose truth or falsity can be revealed by choices.
On the final point, I repeat my question, since you didn’t answer it. Do you have no opinion as to whether your disutility from being tortured to death is more or less than my disutility from a cold shower? If you prefer, make it two other people. Are you agnostic as to whether, on average, people whose last name starts with B get more disutlity from being tortured to death than people whose last name starts with C get from taking a cold chower?
Interpersonal utility seems to be entirely incomparable in an objective (mathematical/quantitative) sense. That in no way means I have no opinion at all as to e.g. whether I’d suffer more disutility from being tortured to death than you would from a cold shower. Opinions aren’t facts. It’s certainly possible for you to suffer more disutility from a cold shower than I would suffer from being tortured to death.
Do you have no opinion as to whether your disutility from being tortured to death is more or less than my disutility from a cold shower?
That is correct.
No–although I have no objection to cardinal utilities.
How can you merge two ordered lists that don’t have some basic common unit of ordering?
It’s like taking my preference for movies (1-> X, 2-> Y 3-> Z) and yours (1->R, 2-> Q, 3-> S) and merging them without considering some value like “rating out of five stars”. There is no theoretical way of merging the above lists just as ordered lists.
John Von Neumann
I’ll look into it.
I think there is much to be said for defining it as the suicide point
If 0 is the suicide point, then there is nothing worse than suicide. That means that having your arm chopped off and then committing suicide is better than committing suicide. No?
but then, units are essentially arbitrary for most cardinal measures, no reason why Centigrade is more natural than Fahrenheit, or vice versa.
You still need a 0, otherwise you can’t say “twice as much.” When people only had C and F they could not say “twice as hot” in a physical sense. Only when K came around could they do that.
But the statement “I value A more than B by twice as much as I value A more than C” turns out to be a meaningful statement, whose truth or falsity can be revealed by choices.
“If 0 is the suicide point, then there is nothing worse than suicide. That means that having your arm chopped off and then committing suicide is better than committing suicide. No?”
No. There are numbers lower than zero. Lots of them.
"You still need a 0, otherwise you can’t say “twice as much.”
Consider temperature. I can say that the increase in temperature from yesterday to today is twice the increase for the same dates last year, even if the zero point is arbitrary. Similarly here. We are always comparing alternatives, and I can say that alternative A is better than B by twice as much as C is better than D–no zero point required.
“Could you give me an example.”
Von Neumann solved the problem by considering choices under uncertainty. Suppose I am indifferent between a certainty of outcome B and a coin flip between A and C. That means that [U(A)+U(C)]/2 = U(B), where U is Von Neumann utility.
I think that the concept of lotteries which is used to construct Von Neumann utility is a kind of thought-experiment because we rarely, if ever, actually know the probabilities of the respective outcomes of our choices nor are payouts guaranteed. Hence, VN utility exists in the same kind of state as an Evenly-Rotating Economy. Both describe a counter-factual world which may be helpful in illuminating the real world as long the conditions imposed on our conclusions by the thought-experiment are not overlooked. VNM speaks of “choice” but this is not real choice, it is a kind of idealized choice that may or may not share essential characeristics with real choices.
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