r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.
I don't like average utilitarianism, and I wasn't even aware that most folks here did, but I still have a guess as to why.
For many people, average utilitarianism is believed to be completely unachievable. There is no way to discover peoples utility functions in a way that can be averaged together. You cannot get people to honesty report their utility functions, and further they can never even know them, because they have no way to normalize and figure out whether or not they actually care more than the person next to therm.
However, a sufficiently advanced Friendly AI may be able to discover the true utility functions of everyone by looking into everyone's brains at the same time. This makes average utilitarianism an actual plausible option for a futurist, but complete nonsense for a professional population ethicist.
This is all completely a guess.
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.