In order to not ‘shoot yourself in the foot’ you must have some sense of coherence to your choices
If Robert values all human lives equally, and his goal is to save the most lives then he must be consistent in the
amount of dollars he spends per life.
If there is a list of options he wont save two people for 5k and one young kid over there for 500k. There will be
a general amount assigned to each life because he is consistent.
I need to review the coherence theorem here.
”So the fact that Alice can’t be viewed as having any coherent relative value for apples and oranges, corresponds
to her ending up with qualitatively less of some category of fruit (without any corresponding gains elsewhere).”
Example in post.
”If we can’t look at Alice’s trades and make up some relative quantitative values of fruit, such that Alice could
be trading consistently with respect to those values, then Alice’s trading strategy must have been dominated by
some other strategy that would have ended up with strictly more fruit across all categories."
"But in general: If we can sensibly view any agent as doing as well as qualitatively possible at anything, we must
be able to view the agent’s behavior as consistent with there being some coherent relative quantities of
wantedness for all the thingies it’s trying to optimize.” This wantedness is defined with a utility function which
can be described relative to anything as that base of utility (1U = 5 pennies, or 1U = watching a cat chase a
pointer for 10 seconds etc.)