That would normally be referred to as consequentialism, not utilitarianism.

To the extent that lesswrong has an official ethical system, that system is definitely not utilitarianism.

Using a car analogy, I would say that intelligence is how strong your engine is. Whereas rationality is driving in a way where you get to your destination efficiently and alive. Someone can have a car with a really powerful engine, but they might drive recklessly or only have the huge engine for signalling purposes while not actually using their car to get to a particular destination.

What sophisticated ideas did you come up with independently before encountering them in a more formal context?

I'm pretty sure that in my youth I independently came up with rudimentary versions of the anthropic principle and the Problem of Evil. Looking over my Livejournal archive, I was clearly not a fearsome philosophical mind in my late teens, (or now, frankly), so it seems safe to say that these ideas aren't difficult to stumble across.

While discussing this at the most recent London Less Wrong meetup, another attendee claimed to have independently arrived at Pascal's Wager. I've seen a couple of different people speculate that cultural and ideological artefacts are subject to selection and evolutionary pressures without ever themselves having come across memetics as a concept.

I'm still thinking about ideas we come up with that stand to reason. Rather than prime you all with the hazy ideas I have about the sorts of ideas people converge on while armchair-theorising, I'd like to solicit some more examples. What ideas of this sort did you come up with independently, only to discover they were already "a thing"?

This is order of magnitude more readable than the previous chapter, I applaude this.

I have to second though a critique by Tenoke: when Harry says "What, am I a book now?" it feels inconsistent, because he already had guessed that he was in a book. Characters that know they are in a book are ok (think Sophie by Gaarder), characters that have amnesia every paragraph are not.

But I am curious to read some more.

This reminds me of the response to the surgeon's dilemma about trust in hospitals. I want to say occupants, because if fear of being sacrificed in trolley problems causes fewer people adopt safer non distractable non fatiguable robot cars then it seems like a net utilitarian loss. If that were not the case, like for example if the safety advantage became overwhelming enough that people bought them anyway, then probably it should just minimize deaths. (I only thought about this for a couple of minutes though)

Why did you cut out the trap bar deadlifts that you had included in Minimum Viable Workout? Was it just because the darned trap bars are at so few gyms?

What is this "social discovery" term? Do you mean just, like, meeting people, networking, and making friends?

I get confused when people use language that talks about things like "fairness", or whether people are "deserving" of one thing or another. What does that even mean? And who or what is to say? Is it some kind of carryover from religious memetic influence? An intuition that a cosmic judge decides what people are "supposed" to get? A confused concept people invoke to try to get what they want? My inclination is to just eliminate the whole concept from my vocabulary. Is there a sensible interpretation that makes these words meaningful to atheist/agnostic consequentialists, one that eludes me right now?