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Lukas_Gloor comments on 'Effective Altruism' as utilitarian equivocation. - Less Wrong
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Good points, but I think there are ways to still keep value complexity.
The population ethics of preference utilitarianism seem underdetermined. Rather than maximizing the total amount of satisfied preferences, you could also go for minimizing the amount of frustrated preferences. If there is no obligation to bring new preferences into existence just in order to satisfy them, then the originally existing preferences won't be overriden by future robots optimized for mutual preference-satisfaction.
And assuming that there is such a thing as a "terminal value", then getting someone to abandon their true value for tradition for something else would still count as a preference-violation if you assume idealized preference utilitarianism (which seems very similar to CEV) rather than straightforward preference utilitarianism that takes people's stated preferences at face value.
This is a form of negative utilitarianism, and inherits the major problems with that theory (such as its endorsement of destroying the universe to stop all the frustrated preferences going on it in it right now).
It might, but it would be one that was outweighed by the larger number of preference-satisfactions to be gained from doing so, just like the disutility of torturing someone for 50 years is outweighed by the utility of avoiding 3^^^3 dust-speck incidents (for utilitarian utility functions).
Not if people have a strong preference to go on living. Killing them would frustrate this preference. This view would only imply that you shouldn't go on procreating indefinitely into the future if this would produce lots of unsatisfied preferences overall. So this conclusion depends on empirical circumstances, and it would be odd to reject a normative view because of this.
Perhaps, that too is an empirical question. If people's preferences for tradition were strong enough, it likely wouldn't get outweighed. And if the preferences are weak, it being outweighed wouldn't pose much of a problem, given the framework in consideration.
The preference to go on living results in large part from the good things (i.e. opportunities for preference satisfaction) available in life. If we didn't care about those any more, the strength of the preference to go on living would presumably diminish considerably.
But yes, the policy recommendations of utilitarianism always depend on how the numbers actually come out. The point is that they're too dependent on a single parameter, or a small subset of parameters, contrary to complexity of value.
(I would go so far as to argue that this is by design: utilitarianism historically comes from an intellectual context in which people thought moral theories ought to be simple.)