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Pablo_Stafforini comments on Crossing the experiments: a baby - Less Wrong
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My general point is that whatever property you rely upon to make comparisons within pains you can also rely upon to make comparisons between pains and pleasures.
It seems to me that you are using intensity of desire to make comparisons within pains. If so, you can also use intensity of desire to make comparisons between pleasures and pains. That "there would be no reason why people need to choose an exchange rate corresponding to some measured properties" seems inadequate as a reply, since you could analogously argue that there is no reason why people should rely on those measured properties to make comparisons within pains.
However, if intensity of desire is not the property you are using to make comparisons within pains, just ignore the previous paragraph. My general point still stands: the property you are using, whichever it is, is also a property that you could use to make comparisons between pains and pleasures.
I'm not sure if it's possible to separate "felt intensity" from "intensity of desire". (I don't know what pain/suffering without a desire that it not exist would be.) But however that may be, your point doesn't seem to settle the population-ethical issue: If we look at hedonic desires (weighted by intensity), should we maximize [fulfilled desires - unfulfilled desires] or minimize [unfulfilled desires]? A desire can be considered a problem to be solved. If we want to solve the world's problems (which motivation seems to underly what many people are doing), does it make more sense to minimize unsolved problems or to create as many solved problems as possible? - I think clearly the former, for the non-existence of problems (and thus of solved problems) does not intrinsically pose a problem.
Why isn't it all one scale of "felt hedonic intensity"? If it was all one scale, it seems that placing the 0-point would be a purely formal and arbitrary matter. But we agree that it's not - so there seems to be something substantial going on when hedonic tone changes from "pleasurable" to "painful". We're not sliding along a scale of more/less of the same thing - at some point, the thing in question changes. Suppose I grant you that there is a way of comparing pleasure- and pain-intensities: "Here's a pain of intensity x, and there's something that's a pleasure and has the same intensity x." Now how are you going to establish that x-intensity of that other thing (pleasure) morally outweighs x-intensity of pain? Maybe it's 2x-intensity of the other thing? How's that choice not arbitrary? As Lukas said, the choice seems to be based on how much you crave the other thing (and its greater intensity), i.e. on how much of a problem its absence is to you. And this brings us back to minimizing unsolved problems, it seems.