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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eolin" data-source="post: 2095076" data-attributes="member: 13266">Whatever we call it today. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />Only because I am ignoring probability and simplifying to a point where I don't want my professors to see it. But yeah, basicaly you determine which outcome has the most likely most utility outcomes. How you get there can shift. If they knew what they wanted, what're they doing going through a descision procedure?But seriously, yeah, that'd be an error in assigning utility. If you already know that you are going to choose one outcome over the others, then there is little need in going through the formalized descision nexus. Instead, you could just give Mexican food an arbitrarily-high utility ranking on "taste" or some other criterion such that it will necessarily win. In other words, because you have already come to a descision, there is no reason for you to use a descision procedure.They represent utility. Which is probably defined in terms of human desire-satisfaction or human happiness or something else that has an intuitive definition. One problem here is that once a term is used in a formalized defintion, it is difficult to define without simply pointing to the formalization, which causes some obvious problems -- such as not always knowing what we're talking about. Descision Theory doesn't define happiness for us, that's left up the individuals. That's actually a very good point. This is where Baysean Belief conditionalization comes into play -- which is a fancy way of saying that we should always be able to modify our beliefs (and thus, our actions) when we get new information. If we set this up as a real Baysean Learning system (I know, I'm throwing that word around without defining it -- go look up Bayes Theorem), then all new data would change the probabilities of our various hypotheses. And that, in turn, would change which one we decide has the most possible potential for good.It helps us make descisions. And no, it doesn't yet do it well. I'm working on that.One problem descision theory is working on, one that a former professor if mine is working on, is that we are inherently pretty stupid creatures. And so where I think he is working on is to develop a methodology of making descisions that we can use in everyday life. Truth be told, I woudn't be altogether suprised if it wound up looking a lot like a virtue-based ethical system in which you are supposed to act in a certain sort of way in order to meximize good so far as you can understand it'll be there.Basically, I think we're going to come full circle in utilitarianism and wind up back with a well-defined and worked out virtue ethics that looks a lot like that of Aristotle.But that last bit is just speculation. For now, it only makes sense to judge what descision you will make based upon how much desire satisfaction it can cause. If we're not basing our descisions on human happiness, then I don't know what we're basing them on. And that's all that descision theory lets us do -- its a methodology for coming to descisions.</blockquote>

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