(I've avoided elaboration and qualifiers in favor of conciseness and clarity. Let me know if you want me to say more.)

Nope, your longer explanation was perfect, and now I understand, thanks. I'm just a little curious why you would say those things lead to inefficiency instead of unhappiness, but you don't have to elaborate any more here unless you feel like it.

Well, that's part of the story.

Again, now I'm slightly curious about the rest of it...

I'm going to guess that the reason why you wouldn't want to do drugs even if you knew they'd make you happy is because a) it'd sort of numb you away from thinking critically and making decisions, and b) you wouldn't get to do good for the world. Your current lifestyle doesn't seem to be preventing you from doing either of those.

Good guess. You're right. But (I initially thought) smoking would hardly prevent those things, and I still don't want to smoke. Then again, addiction could interfere with a), and the opportunity cost of buying cigarettes could interfere with b).

I've proposed the same thought experiment except with buying diamonds.

No way! A while back, I facebook-shared a very similar link about the ridiculousness of the diamond marketing scheme and proposed various alternatives to spending money on a diamond ring. I wasn't even aware that the organization was inhumane.. yikes, information like that should be common knowledge. Also, probably at least some people don't really want to get a diamond ring... but by the time the relationship gets serious, they can't get themselves to bring it up (girls don't want to be presumptuous, guys don't want to risk a conflict?) so yeah, definitely a good kind of thing to get out of the way in a dating profile, haha.

This post has been of moderate help to me because I understood what virtue ethics are after reading it.

Wow, that's so interesting, I'd never heard of virtue ethics before. I have many thoughts/questions about this, but let's save that conversation for another day so my brain doesn't suffer an overuse injury. My inner virtue-ethicist wants to become a more thoughtful person, but I know myself well enough to know that if I dive into all this stuff head first, it will just end up to be "a weird thinking phase I went through once" and instrumentally, I want to be thoughtful because of my terminal value of caring about the world. (My gut reaction: Virtues are really just instrumental values that make life convenient for people whose terminal values are unclear/intimidating. (Like how the author of the link chose loyalty as a virtue. I bet we could find a situation in which she would abandon that loyalty.) But I also think that there's a place for cost-benefit analysis even within virtue ethics, and that virtue ethicists with thoughtfully-chosen virtues can be more efficient consequentialists, which probably doesn't make much sense, but I'd like to be both, please!)

If you could just flip a switch and make everyone have equal preference ratios, I think that'd probably be a good thing...it's socially optimal for us to accept our uneven preference ratios to some extent. Thoughts?

Oh, yeah, that makes sense to me. Kind of like capitalism, it seems to work better in practice if we just acknowledge human nature. But gradually, as a society, we can shift the preference ratios a bit, and I think we maybe are. :) We can point to a decrease in imperialism, the budding effective altruism movement, or even veganism's growing popularity as examples of this shifting preference ratio.