@cshentrup@mastodon.social it's turtles all the way down! if you want to formalize it. "utility" is just a tautological name for what you are after, and if you are modeling your decisionmaking formally, sure, eventually you'll choose what your models (including metamodels) maximize. 1/
@cshentrup@mastodon.social but incorporating meta-models is a big choice! that is, you have a model of the world that is your best guess for how things work, but then you impose some probability that it's wrong and incorporate a variety of other models that you don't think are best, that in some sense you think wrong, with some probability, is a big deal. and then there's the problem of the choice of other models. how do you select & apply probabilities to worldviews you think not-best? /fin
@cshentrup@mastodon.social (indirectly, outside of the language of utilitarianism or any kind of formalism, i get into these issues a bit here.) https://drafts.interfluidity.com/2023/08/14/fascism-as-triage/index.html
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Social affairs are not like natural sciences where usually ([not always]) one way of modeling the world is plainly "best" and we should work from that story, discarding all the rest. Navigating social affairs requires developing a collection of different, often conflicting, accounts of how things work and making wise decisions about which accounts to use in different contexts and for different purposes. It is not only legitimate, but morally necessary, to consider the implications of different accounts before choosing which one you will let guide your actions. When policymakers accept "hard truths that can't be denied" (in modern parlance, we might hear
"the science can't be denied"), we face a risk they might persuade themselves to do something awful.
It's hubris to imagine there is any science so reliable in social affairs, and it is sin to allow any collection of (now studies or (then) political theories, to justify exclusion, elimination, disenfranchisement, collective punishment or penury in the name of your certainty in some greater good. If you would neither scruple to let your "hard truths" frame some hard action, nor derive any kind of moral and constructive action from your theory, what good to anvone is vour "science"? The rational choice is to draw from our portfolio of understandings multiple but actionable truths - the best we can come up with, but subject to a usefulness constraint - and then apply them constructively.](https://econtwitter-media.mwt.me/media_attachments/files/110/957/124/978/220/462/original/6e468b0e79deb77a.png)