I really liked this post and made me think! Here are some stray thoughts which I’m not super confident in:
Something similar to Linear Tolerance and No Significant Tolerance are called negative-leaning utilitarianism (or weak negative utilitarianism) and lexical-threshold negative utilitarianism (see here or here)
It seems like logarithmic trade-offs are just linear tolerance where we’ve scaled (exponentially) all original suffering values x↦exp(x−ab). I’m not sure if it’s just easier just to think the suffering values were already this value and then use linear tolerance?
I’m confused by your use of x and y for amounts of suffering and happiness for an individual. I’m guessing you’re also factoring in intensity?
Here I’m using x and y to denote amounts of suffering/happiness, whether constrained to one individual or spread among many (or even distributed among some non-individualistic sentience).
Using exponentially-scaled linear tolerance seems equivalent mathematically. If anything, it highlights to me that how you define the measures for happiness and suffering is quite impactful, and needs to be carefully considered.
I really liked this post and made me think! Here are some stray thoughts which I’m not super confident in:
Something similar to Linear Tolerance and No Significant Tolerance are called negative-leaning utilitarianism (or weak negative utilitarianism) and lexical-threshold negative utilitarianism (see here or here)
It seems like logarithmic trade-offs are just linear tolerance where we’ve scaled (exponentially) all original suffering values x↦exp(x−ab). I’m not sure if it’s just easier just to think the suffering values were already this value and then use linear tolerance?
I’m confused by your use of x and y for amounts of suffering and happiness for an individual. I’m guessing you’re also factoring in intensity?
Here I’m using x and y to denote amounts of suffering/happiness, whether constrained to one individual or spread among many (or even distributed among some non-individualistic sentience).
Using exponentially-scaled linear tolerance seems equivalent mathematically. If anything, it highlights to me that how you define the measures for happiness and suffering is quite impactful, and needs to be carefully considered.