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.
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