This is a linkpost for http://putanumonit.com/2016/10/06/theory-of-an-immoral-sentiment/
There are other things you value besides happiness, which can also be hyper-satisfied at the cost of abandoning other values. Maybe you really love music, and funding poor Western artists instead of saving the global poor from starvation would increase the production of your favorite sub-genre by 1000x. Maybe you care about making humanity an interplanetary species, and giving your savings to SpaceX instead of the AMF could make it come true. If only those pesky emotion of empathy didn't distract you all the time.
How can you choose one value to maximize?
Furthermore, 'increasing happiness' probably isn't a monolithic value, it has divisions and subgoals. And most likely, there are also multiple emotions and instincts that make you value them. Maybe you somewhat separately value saving people's lives, separately value reducing suffering, separately value increasing some kinds of freedom or equality, separately value helping people in your own country vs. the rest of the world.
If you could choose to hyper-satisfy one sub-value at the expense of all the others, which would you choose? Saving all the lives, but letting them live in misery? Eliminating pain, but not caring when people die? Helping only people of one gender, or of one faith, or one ethnicity?
The answer might be to find other people who care about the same set of values as you do. Each will agree to work on one thing only, and gain the benefits of so specializing. (If you could just pool and divide your resources the problem would be solved already.) But your emotions would still be satisfied from knowing you're achieving all your values; if you withdraw from the partnership, the others would adjust their funding in a way that would (necessarily) defund each project proportionally to how much you value it. So you wouldn't need to 'discard' your emotions.
I do think all this is unnecessary in practice, because there aren't large benefits to be gained by discarding some emotions and values.
I agree with you on the complexity of value. However, perhaps we are imagining the ideal way of aggregating all those complex values differently. I absolutely agree that the simple models I keep proposing for individual values are spherical cows, and ignore a lot of nuance. I just don't see things working radically differently when the nuance is added in, and the values aggregated.
That sounds like a really complex discussion though, and I don't think either of us is likely to convince the other without a novel's worth of text. However, perhaps I can convin...