If not, you seem to not intrinsically value the creation of satisfied preferences.
You're right that I do not intrinsically value the creation of all satisfied preferences. This is where my version of Moore's Ideal Utilitarianism comes in. What I value is the creation of people with satisfied preferences if doing so also fulfills certain moral ideals I (and most other people, I think) have about how the world ought to be. In cases where the creation of a person with satisfied preferences would not fulfill those ideals I am essentially a negative preference utilitarian, I treat the creation of a person who doesn't fulfill those ideals the same way a negative preference utilitarian would.
I differ from Moore in that I think the only way to fulfill an ideal is to create (or not create) a person with certain preferences and satisfy those preferences. I don't think, like he did, that you can (for example) increase the beauty in the world by creating pretty objects no one ever sees.
I think a good analogy would again be Parfit's concept of global preferences. If I read a book, and am filled with a mild preference to read more books with the same characters, such a desire is in line with my global preferences, so it is good for it to be created. By contrast, being addicted to heroin would fill me with a strong preference to use heroin. This preference is not in line with my global preferences, so I would be willing to hurt myself to avoid creating it.
Suppose there were ten people, and they would be okay with getting tortured, adding a billion tortured people, plus adding a sufficiently large number of people with preferences more-satisfied-than-not.
I have moral ideals about many things, which include how many people there should be, their overall level of welfare, and most importantly, what sort of preferences they ought to have. It seems likely to me that the scenario with the torture+new people scenario would violate those ideals, so I probably wouldn't go along with it.
To give an example where creating the wrong type of preference would be a negative, I would oppose the creation of a sociopath or a paperclip maximizer, even if their life would have more satisfied preferences than not. Such a creature would not be in line with my ideals about what sort of creatures should exist. I would even be willing to harm myself or others, to some extent, to prevent their creation.
This brings up a major question I have about negative preference utilitarianism, which I wonder if you could answer since you seem to have thought more about the subject of negative utilitarianism than I have. How much harm should a negative preference utilitarian be willing to inflict on existing people to prevent a new person from being born? For instance, suppose you had a choice between torturing every person on Earth for the rest of their lives, or creating one new person who will live the life of a rich 1st world person with a high happiness set point? Surely you wouldn't torture everyone on Earth? A hedonist negative utilitarian wouldn't of course, but we're talking about negative preference utilitarianism.
A similar question I have is, if a creature with an unbounded utility function is created, does that mean that infinite wrong has been done, since such a creature essentially has infinite unsatisfied preferences? How does negative preference utilitarianism address this?
The best thing I can come up with is to give the creation of such a creature a utility penalty equal to "However much utility the creature accumulates over its lifetime, minus x," where x is a moderately sized number. However, it occurs to me that someone whose thought more about the subject than me might have figured out something better.
Something you wrote in a comment further above:
This also entails accepting the Sadistic Conclusion, but that is an unavoidable part of all types of Negative Utilitarianism, whether they are of the normal variety, or the weird "sometimes negative sometimes positive depending on the context" variety I employ.
I don't think so, neither negative preference nor negative hedonistic utilitarianism implies the Sadistic Conclusion. Granted, negative utilitarians would prefer to add a small population of beings with terrible lives over a very large bei...
Summary: The term 'effective altuist' invites confusion between 'the right thing to do' and 'the thing that most efficiently promotes welfare.' I think this creeping utilitarianism is a bad thing, and should at least be made explicit. This is not to accuse anyone of deliberate deception.
Over the last year or so, the term 'Effective Altruist' has come into use. I self-identified as one on the LW survey, so I speak as a friend. However, I think there is a very big danger with the terminology.
The term 'Effective Altruist' was born out of the need for a label for those people who were willing to dedicate their lives to making the world a better place in rational ways, even if that meant doing counter-intuitive things, like working as an Alaskan truck driver. The previous term, 'really super awesome hardcore people', was indeed a little inelegant.
However, 'Effective Altruist' has a major problem: it refers to altruism, not ethics. Altruism may be a part of ethics (though the etymology of the term gives some concern), but it is not all there is to ethics. Value is complex. Helping people is good, but so is truth, and justice, and freedom, and beauty, and loyalty, and fairness, and honor, and fraternity, and tradition, and many other things.
A charity that very efficiently promoted beauty and justice, but only inefficiently produced happiness, would probably not be considered an EA organization. A while ago I suggested to [one of the leaders of the Center for Effective Altruism] the creation of a charity to promote promise-keeping. I didn't claim such a charity would be an optimal way of promoting happiness, and to them, this was sufficient to show 1) that it was not EA - and hence 2) inferior to EA things.
Such thinking involves either a equivocation or a concealed premise. If 'EA' is interpreted literally, so 'the primary/driving goal is to help others', then something not being EA is insufficient for it to not be the best thing you could do - there is more to ethics and the good, than altruism and promoting welfare. Failure to promote one dimension of the good doesn't mean you're not the optimal way of promoting their sum. On the other hand, if 'EA' is interpreted broadly, as being concerned with 'happiness, health, justice, fairness and/or other values', then merely failing to promote welfare/happiness does not mean a cause is not EA. Much EA discussion, like on the popular facebook group, equivocates between these two meanings.*
...Unless one thought that helping people was all their was to ethics, in which case this is not equivocation. As virtually all of CEA's leaders are utilitarians, it is plausible that is was the concealed premise in their argument. In this case, there is no equivocation, but a different logical fallacy, that of an omitted premise, has been committed. And we should be just as wary as in the case of equivocation.
Unfortunately, utilitarianism is false, or at least not obviously true. Something can be the morally best thing to do, while not being EA. Just because some utilitarians have popularized a term which cleverly equivocates between "promotes welfare" and "is the best thing" does not mean we should be taken in. Every fashionable ideology likes to blurr the lines between its goals and its methods (is Socialism about helping the working man or about state ownership of industry? is libertarianism about freedom or low taxes?) in order to make people who agree with the goals forget that there might be other means of achieving them.
There are two options: recognize 'EA' as referring to only a subset of morality, or recognize as 'EA' actions and organizations that are ethical through ways other than producing welfare/happiness.
* Yes, one might say that promoting X's honor thereby helped X, and thus there was no distinction. However, I think people who make this argument in theory are unlikely to observe it in practice - I doubt that there will be an EA organisation dedicated to pure retribution, even if it was both extremely cheap to promote and a part of ethics.