I am studying about Cardinal Utility in Economics (or more generally, how to quantify pleasure and pain!)
Intuitively, I assign a positive number to pleasurable experiences, and a negative number to painful experiences:
- pleasurable experience $\rightarrow$ positive number
- painful experience $\rightarrow$ negative number
- greater the magnitude of the number $\rightarrow$ more intense is the pleasure or pain
But... is there anyway to transform this scale into the positive real numbers?
- more painful the experience $\rightarrow$ closer to zero
- more pleasurable the experience $\rightarrow$ larger positive number
That way, I won't need to worry about sign!