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Re:Utility monster by stared on Friday May 15, 2020 @07:08AM (#23190802)
This is a problem only for unbounded utility, and can occur for both a super happy monster, and a monster in extreme anguish.

Once you make utility which is in a fixed range, Utility Monster disappears.

Re:Utility monster by IanCal on Friday May 15, 2020 @07:17AM (#23190854)
I don't think it does. You have still the issue of the unhappy monster once everyone else has hit the "max" utility. You would spend all your resources on them rather than improve things for the rest of the group because they are now deemed unimprovable.
Re:Utility monster by stared on Friday May 15, 2020 @07:21AM (#23190881)
You don't get anyone hit 0 or 1. (Compare with probabilities predicted by a sigmoid - it never reaches 0 or 1.)
Re:Utility monster by ben_w on Friday May 15, 2020 @07:50AM (#23191068)
Loose eyelashes vs factory farmed human flesh.

Both are finite pain/finite negative utility.

How many of the former must be avoided to equally balance the creation of one of the latter?

Re:Utility monster by chaorace on Friday May 15, 2020 @09:13AM (#23191768)
Question: how is that mathematically different from bounding by negative & positive infinity?
Re:Utility monster by stared on Friday May 15, 2020 @09:47AM (#23192092)
sigmoid(x_1 + ... + x_n) != sigmoid(x_1) + ... + sigmoid(x_n)
Re:Utility monster by lidHanteyk on Friday May 15, 2020 @12:34PM (#23194118)
No, as long as one entity can derive exponentially more utility than another, utility monsters are possible; such monsters cannot be satisfied only with polynomially many sacrifices.