2019-02-02: Cornell 1 RPI 1 (ot)

[BearLover]

So if we somehow won the NC this year (we can dream, right?), what "price" would you be willing to pay for that?  Going 10 years without an NCAA tournament win? 20 years? something else?

I'm sure they covered this on The Good Place.

Expected value calculations collapse in scenarios like that.  That's why utilitarianism is stupid.

This is a conversation absolutely no one on this forum wants to read, but I don't understand why "EV calculations" would "collapse" or why this scenario would make utilitarianism "stupid."

Fuck em.  They don't have to read if they don't want to.

Hey, you people?  You don't have to read if you don't want to!

Because qualities like "happiness" don't behave as quantities like "liters of water." John Stuart Mill was a very nice man, at least after he had his breakdown, and a very, very smart man, but all his work relies on a category error.  From what I understand of him had he realized this it would have given him a good laugh.

That's why the hypothetical above is a nonsense question.  It reduces to "in order to be happy would you be unhappy?"  The logical answer to which is "fuck art let's dance."

But nothing in life comes down to expected value. Everything comes down to expected utility, even if we may not consciously make decisions in those terms. When we decide how much water to drink, we don't run an expected value calculation in our head to maximize water consumed, or health benefits, or anything else. We instead, on an instinctive/intuitive level, make the choice that we perceive will maximize our utility: how much water should I drink to make me happiest in this moment? That is to say, we may struggle to break our decisions down into coherent utilitarian choices, but that does not mean we are not making the choice that we think maximizes our happiness, a/k/a our utility. That's what everything boils down to; there is no way around it. And, therefore, a hard choice--where utility now (national title) comes at the cost of utility later (lack of future success)--doesn't disprove utilitarianism, in my view. How else are we supposed to make, or talk about, these types of decisions?

[Trotsky]

That's what everything boils down to; there is no way around it. And, therefore, a hard choice--where utility now (national title) comes at the cost of utility later (lack of future success)--doesn't disprove utilitarianism, in my view. How else are we supposed to make, or talk about, these types of decisions?

No.  You're retconning behavior to match a model of utility that makes you feel in control.  In reality you're almost never making utility comparisons unless they are very, very explicit: "Do I want that necklace enough to risk prison stealing it?"  There is no little man inside the brain making subconscious choices.  Your rational mind is just along for the ride.  You have already reached for the slice of cake.  Finding that the fatness shame variable happened to come out less than the desire variable was a bit of slapdash math you invented later to make sense of it.

But even though utilitarianism is stupid because of the above, I'm talking about a different way in which utilitarianism is stupid, and that's the comparison of "Happiness Volumes" the hypothetical posits: a fairly steady Happiness of 8 across 10 years for 80 hy vs a 1st quadrant hyperbola with a left marginal max of something unknown but approaching infinity dropping back to nearly zero for the remainder of the ten year interval for x hy.  Solve for x.

That's an extremely clever way to mischaracterize happiness in order to try to rationalize choices.  But it's wrong.  

Here's a simple example: cut your own baby's throat or nuke Paris.  Pick.  It should be simple: one baby unit times your weighted caring coefficient for that baby vs lots and lots of babies (and others) with a complex function of the weighting coefficients of various types of strangers.

Do you want to answer that based on utilitarian calculus, or do you join me in my answer: "blow me."

[Trotsky]

TOI was mentioned in another thread (wait... by me!) and that reminded me that Vanderlaan seemed to barely leave the ice during the RPI game.  Does anybody actually track player TOI for our games?  This is the most detail I've seen so far.

[Swampy]

But nothing in life comes down to expected value. Everything comes down to expected utility, even if we may not consciously make decisions in those terms. When we decide how much water to drink, we don't run an expected value calculation in our head to maximize water consumed, or health benefits, or anything else. We instead, on an instinctive/intuitive level, make the choice that we perceive will maximize our utility: how much water should I drink to make me happiest in this moment? That is to say, we may struggle to break our decisions down into coherent utilitarian choices, but that does not mean we are not making the choice that we think maximizes our happiness, a/k/a our utility. That's what everything boils down to; there is no way around it. And, therefore, a hard choice--where utility now (national title) comes at the cost of utility later (lack of future success)--doesn't disprove utilitarianism, in my view. How else are we supposed to make, or talk about, these types of decisions?

Behavioral Economics finds people don't really make decisions this way. Even the examples being debated in this discussion are devoid of probabilistic risk. Within mainstream economics, the work of Tversky and Kahneman is begrudgingly accepted as successfully undermining the theory of rational choice. If one now includes heterodox economic critics, the "rational" model of decision-making can be seen as utter nonsense. For example, Lee and Keen (2004: 175-176) estimate that a supermarket shopping trip in which a budget-constrained consumer follows the mainstream, "rational" decision model to choose among 30 products in quantities ranging from 0 to 10 would take 5.53¹³ years to decide on what mix of products to buy.

[Scersk '97]

But nothing in life comes down to expected value. Everything comes down to expected utility, even if we may not consciously make decisions in those terms. When we decide how much water to drink, we don't run an expected value calculation in our head to maximize water consumed, or health benefits, or anything else. We instead, on an instinctive/intuitive level, make the choice that we perceive will maximize our utility: how much water should I drink to make me happiest in this moment? That is to say, we may struggle to break our decisions down into coherent utilitarian choices, but that does not mean we are not making the choice that we think maximizes our happiness, a/k/a our utility. That's what everything boils down to; there is no way around it. And, therefore, a hard choice--where utility now (national title) comes at the cost of utility later (lack of future success)--doesn't disprove utilitarianism, in my view. How else are we supposed to make, or talk about, these types of decisions?

Behavioral Economics finds people don't really make decisions this way. Even the examples being debated in this discussion are devoid of probabilistic risk. Within mainstream economics, the work of Tversky and Kahneman is begrudgingly accepted as successfully undermining the theory of rational choice. If one now includes heterodox economic critics, the "rational" model of decision-making can be seen as utter nonsense. For example, Lee and Keen (2004: 175-176) estimate that a supermarket shopping trip in which a consumer follows the mainstream, "rational" decision model to choose among 30 products in quantities ranging from 0 to 10 would take 5.53¹³ years to decide on what mix of products to buy.

To my eye, Bearlover has conflated happiness and utility unproductively. Rather than a disagreement, I see you two circling around the same idea.

Humans build heuristics not to maximize happiness/utility [Bearlover's conflation]; rather, they build heuristics because they think by doing so they can maximize utility without having to sacrifice the time necessary to break every moment of existence down to a rational choice, a time-wasting activity that makes normal people (not me! surely) deeply unhappy. The heuristics turn into black boxes, and humans keep bumbling along with those black boxes because few want to do the hard work of creating new ones and/or the problems those heuristics gloss are fantastically complex and not remotely solvable by rational means. I think Bearlover might be going wrong in thinking that most of these black boxes were ever based on utility in the first place.

Heuristics, to my mind, are as much objects of psychology as they are objects of economics; indeed, some of the heuristics most deeply inscribed in culture are matters of faith and irrationality. Strangely enough, not all of them are wrong, even though most economists, yoked as they are to rational choice, believe that they are... mostly as an article of faith.

PS I love how far this game thread has wandered.
PPS Anyone who follows Cornell hockey as fervently as most of us do here is likely to have an unusual take on rational choice.

[Swampy]

But nothing in life comes down to expected value. Everything comes down to expected utility, even if we may not consciously make decisions in those terms. When we decide how much water to drink, we don't run an expected value calculation in our head to maximize water consumed, or health benefits, or anything else. We instead, on an instinctive/intuitive level, make the choice that we perceive will maximize our utility: how much water should I drink to make me happiest in this moment? That is to say, we may struggle to break our decisions down into coherent utilitarian choices, but that does not mean we are not making the choice that we think maximizes our happiness, a/k/a our utility. That's what everything boils down to; there is no way around it. And, therefore, a hard choice--where utility now (national title) comes at the cost of utility later (lack of future success)--doesn't disprove utilitarianism, in my view. How else are we supposed to make, or talk about, these types of decisions?

Behavioral Economics finds people don't really make decisions this way. Even the examples being debated in this discussion are devoid of probabilistic risk. Within mainstream economics, the work of Tversky and Kahneman is begrudgingly accepted as successfully undermining the theory of rational choice. If one now includes heterodox economic critics, the "rational" model of decision-making can be seen as utter nonsense. For example, Lee and Keen (2004: 175-176) estimate that a supermarket shopping trip in which a consumer follows the mainstream, "rational" decision model to choose among 30 products in quantities ranging from 0 to 10 would take 5.53¹³ years to decide on what mix of products to buy.

To my eye, Bearlover has conflated happiness and utility unproductively. Rather than a disagreement, I see you two circling around the same idea.

Humans build heuristics not to maximize happiness/utility [Bearlover's conflation]; rather, they build heuristics because they think by doing so they can maximize utility without having to sacrifice the time necessary to break every moment of existence down to a rational choice, a time-wasting activity that makes normal people (not me! surely) deeply unhappy. The heuristics turn into black boxes, and humans keep bumbling along with those black boxes because few want to do the hard work of creating new ones and/or the problems those heuristics gloss are fantastically complex and not remotely solvable by rational means. I think Bearlover might be going wrong in thinking that most of these black boxes were ever based on utility in the first place.

Indeed, heuristics, to my mind, are as much objects of psychology as they are objects of economics; indeed, some of the heuristics most deeply inscribed in culture are matters of faith and irrationality. Strangely enough, not all of them are wrong, even though most economists, yoked as they are to rational choice, believe that they are... mostly as an article of faith.

PS I love how far this game thread has wandered.
PPS Anyone who follows Cornell hockey as fervently as most of us do here is likely to have an unusual take on rational choice.

I mostly agree with you, and in my comment I was just mentioning some telling criticisms of rational choice. To your comment, I would simply add that heuristics are likely to be socially & societally constructed and influenced.

Certainly this forum is a prime example of the social influences on our decisions of how to spend our time.

[kevdog8]

Anyone know why the band didn't make the trip to RPI this weekend?

According to Jim Hyla the band plans to make the final two trips to the away series in the coming weeks.

He and I both think the shabby treatment by Union last year factored into the decision to skip RPI and Union.  They treated the band like shit and then denied it all when faced with a letter that Jim wrote to complain.  

Short version IIRC,  the band was told they couldn't play unless Cornell scored. They were told no playing before the game,  no playing during breaks in the action,  and no playing between periods.

The band president negotiated a few concessions and I was amazed at his poise but it really stunk.  In order to play the Alma Mater the band reassembled outside the rink after the game.

Thank God they're having a crap year.

Correct. I talked to someone connected to the band, but not in it and their comment was that the band was quite upset with what happenned at Union. They felt that it was one reason for not making the trip. Another was money, that I believe was the main reason they didn't go to Colgate. If enough people had signed up for the CHA bus to Colgate, then they would have gone on that bus. Since the CHA couldn't find enough fans to fund their bus, the band stayed home.

Band trips are expensive and they just don't have enough money to do it all.

Donate and help them out.

Furthermore, there has been significant visiting band disrespect at RPI in the past few years as well. Without going in to details... it makes sense for us to make the North Country and Yale / Brown trips instead. We usually get respect at those rinks.

[Trotsky]

Certainly this forum is a prime example of the social influences on our decisions of how to spend our time.

And how little rational choice plays into them.

[BearLover]

But nothing in life comes down to expected value. Everything comes down to expected utility, even if we may not consciously make decisions in those terms. When we decide how much water to drink, we don't run an expected value calculation in our head to maximize water consumed, or health benefits, or anything else. We instead, on an instinctive/intuitive level, make the choice that we perceive will maximize our utility: how much water should I drink to make me happiest in this moment? That is to say, we may struggle to break our decisions down into coherent utilitarian choices, but that does not mean we are not making the choice that we think maximizes our happiness, a/k/a our utility. That's what everything boils down to; there is no way around it. And, therefore, a hard choice--where utility now (national title) comes at the cost of utility later (lack of future success)--doesn't disprove utilitarianism, in my view. How else are we supposed to make, or talk about, these types of decisions?

Behavioral Economics finds people don't really make decisions this way. Even the examples being debated in this discussion are devoid of probabilistic risk. Within mainstream economics, the work of Tversky and Kahneman is begrudgingly accepted as successfully undermining the theory of rational choice. If one now includes heterodox economic critics, the "rational" model of decision-making can be seen as utter nonsense. For example, Lee and Keen (2004: 175-176) estimate that a supermarket shopping trip in which a consumer follows the mainstream, "rational" decision model to choose among 30 products in quantities ranging from 0 to 10 would take 5.53¹³ years to decide on what mix of products to buy.

Let me be clear: I absolutely do not mean to suggest that humans are rational or good at maximizing their long-term happiness. But humans being irrational doesn't really have much to do with my point.

I do not have much of a background in philosophy (as may be evident from my posts here), but I do have a background in a number of the social sciences, including behavioral economics. And I simply haven't seen an argument put forth here that there exists a better unit than utility ("utiles") to map out human behavior.

Again, I do not posit that humans are in control of their decision-making. And I am well aware that humans exhibit extremely time-inconsistent preferences across many spaces, including, I would assume, when faced with the choice between a national championship now and sustained success later. But these limitations on rational choice theory can be accounted for within a utilitarian framework; they do not disprove such a framework. That's why behavioral economics still maps out decision-making in terms of utility.

As to Trotsky's original point, making an extremely difficult choice ("do you shoot the baby with the bomb?") goes to a different aspect of utilitarianism. What I discuss above is the positive "modeling human behavior" piece of it. I think Trotsky is getting at the normative piece of utilitarianism--not a description of the world, but rather a prescription of how to act ("do we shoot the baby?"). In this case, the question isn't "can we describe human behavior in a better way than through a utilitarian framework," but rather "is there a better framework than maximizing utility by which to make this choice?" And again I don't think a better framework exists, with some caveats.


According to my rudimentary understanding of philosophy, the alternative to Mill would be a Kantian rights-based framework with universal duties/rules (eg. "You shall not take the life of a living thing"). Here, the man with the gun, who is deciding whether to shoot the baby to save the city, can follow this rule. But what if that rule comes into conflict with other universal rules, or even the same rule? (All the other people in the city would die if you don't shoot the baby!) That is to say, even a rights-based alternative to utilitarianism would fail to help us solve such a problem.

It is true that when taken to an extreme, utilitarianism fails and we resort to Kantian universal rules to guide us. For instance, almost no one would kill someone next to us to save two people on a remote island whom we will never meet. But under an extreme in the other direction, such as a case where we could kill one person to save the rest of humanity, a rights-based framework would fail and we would resort to utilitarianism to guide us.

There simply is no perfect framework by which to answer questions such as these, but on easier, everyday questions, I try to maximize the utility of everyone around me (with the exception of on ELynah, where I act like a nuisance). So my final answer:
1. Map out human behavior in the social sciences according to utility.
2. Live your life according to your own system of values, which should heavily weight your own happiness (utility) and the happiness (utility) of others.
3. When a governing body is implementing laws, it should attempt to maximize utility, balanced, within reason, against maintaining liberty (some proper level of paternalism). This is another prong of this discussion that probably isn't worth getting into now.

[BearLover]

To make matters worse, several of my closed-parens appear as winky faces.

[Trotsky]

To make matters worse, several of my closed-parens appear as winky faces.

Whoever greenlighted double quote plus close paren as a wink emoticon ") was not a grammarian.  I get those all the time, too, which is one reason almost all my posts have edits.

[Scersk '97]

Furthermore, there has been significant visiting band disrespect at RPI in the past few years as well. Without going in to details... it makes sense for us to make the North Country and Yale / Brown trips instead. We usually get respect at those rinks.

To comment on this other thread of the thread, what bothers me is how the band seems to respond to visiting band disrespect with disengagement instead of confrontation, whether direct during the abuse or somewhat indirect after the fact. The current band seems to view all these indignities as just the way things are, rather than, as many of us fossils have told any of them that will listen, the way things were not and, partially, the way they have allowed things to become. "Back in my day," if someone had told us not to play, we would've generally instituted a reign of (clean) mayhem, disrupting anything and everything rink staff tried to do, partially to make our displeasure known and partially because it's enormously fun. These days, the band seems mostly happy to participate jovially in whatever nonsense takes the place of what should be its playing time. This bothers me, to say the least. If they're not going to play or, worse, are willing to sit on their hands, why send them at all?

No doubt, the band receives little support from the current athletics administration. Some of that is due to Andy et al. being Andy et al., but some of it is also due to the band not understanding how to document disrespect, to respond properly at the time, and to wade through official channels in order to urge some sort of response on the part of Athletics.

What response should there be? You disrespect our band by not allowing them to play? Reciprocal oppression should your "band" show up at a game. Official protests to Hagwell from Athletics. At the extreme, docking the visiting tickets allotment.

All this nonsense is so much anti-student, corporate-college bullshit. My worry is that, if the current students don't start standing up for themselves, some Cornell athletics mouth-breather will try to make our wonderful the way things should be look and sound more like the way things are.

[Swampy]

BearLover,

I'm not really sure how to understand your post (not the one about winky faces).

On one hand you say Trotsky is talking about normative utilitarianism, while you are talking about positive utilitarianism. But then you go on to say you "don't think a better framework exists" as a normative to guide decision-making.

Besides several other issues, this presupposes normative vs positive is a meaningful distinction. It reminds me of the title of an article by Andrew Sayer, "Defensible Values in Geography: Can Values be Science Free?" I find his argument compelling: values necessarily presuppose positive understandings, and positive understandings necessarily involve values (e.g. "truth," "rigor," etc.). In other words, normative & positive are two sides of the same coin, so it's no wonder that attempts to separate them wind up obscuring borders.

At the end of the day, and presuming we can positively or normatively analyze society using utility without also taking into account institutions, power relations, historical path-dependence, social conflict, etc., does utility really add anything to our positive understanding that's better than attributing what happens to "God's will"? Does it offer any practical normative guidance that's better than, say, asking, "What would Superman do"? (Or for "Superman" fill in your favorite superhero).

But getting back to hockey and what people would prefer, there can be no right or wrong answer. By definition, the terms of a Faustian bargain can never be spelled out completely. And if we decided, e.g., we want a NC this year even if it means a 20-year drought will follow, who's to say that in 5 or 10 years we would feel the same way (i.e., that our utilities might not have changed or that we'd become different people)?

I hope to see Cornell win another NC before I die. And I'm in really good health, so for now I'm OK with being patient. But a diagnosis of cancer would make me much more impatient.

[ursusminor]

Anyone know why the band didn't make the trip to RPI this weekend?

According to Jim Hyla the band plans to make the final two trips to the away series in the coming weeks.

He and I both think the shabby treatment by Union last year factored into the decision to skip RPI and Union.  They treated the band like shit and then denied it all when faced with a letter that Jim wrote to complain.  

Short version IIRC,  the band was told they couldn't play unless Cornell scored. They were told no playing before the game,  no playing during breaks in the action,  and no playing between periods.

The band president negotiated a few concessions and I was amazed at his poise but it really stunk.  In order to play the Alma Mater the band reassembled outside the rink after the game.

Thank God they're having a crap year.

Correct. I talked to someone connected to the band, but not in it and their comment was that the band was quite upset with what happenned at Union. They felt that it was one reason for not making the trip. Another was money, that I believe was the main reason they didn't go to Colgate. If enough people had signed up for the CHA bus to Colgate, then they would have gone on that bus. Since the CHA couldn't find enough fans to fund their bus, the band stayed home.

Band trips are expensive and they just don't have enough money to do it all.

Donate and help them out.

Furthermore, there has been significant visiting band disrespect at RPI in the past few years as well. Without going in to details... it makes sense for us to make the North Country and Yale / Brown trips instead. We usually get respect at those rinks.

If I may ask, is this disrespect by the RPI band, the HFH staff, or the RPI fans?

[Trotsky]

The only disrespect I ever experienced at Houston was from their rink staff, who were the type of Jonathan Banks ex-felon who hands you the shoes at the bowling alley.  The bandies were always friendly and funny as fuck, and the fans were docile, elderly, and sparse.