Well, what percentage of women would you anticipate regard it as the former versus the latter?

I think the empirical claims of feminism are now successful, but they did exist.

I can't seem to parse this literally. Do you mean that some past empirical claims of feminism are no longer true do the success of the political advocacy of feminism? That seems true (with some controversy on the degree of 'some').

So you have to figure what the heck evolution did, in ways specific enough to program into a computer.

Is that going to be harder that coming up with a mathematical expension of morality and preloading it?

Humans are made to do that by evolution A

Yes. But that doens't mean it is necessarily complicated or arbitrary. We were made to be able to do arithmetic by evolution too.

Also, who mentioned giving AIs a priori knowledge of our preferences?

EY. It's his answer to friendliness.

People manage to be friendly without apriori knowledge of everyone else's preferences,. Human values are very complex...and one person's preferences are not another's. We seem to hack it by having a general directive towards friendliness, combined with dealing with specific preferences as they are encountered ("does my humming annoy you? OK, I'll stop").

How have I been reading Oglaf for so long without knowing about the epilogues?

If someone's entire future will contain nothing but negative utility they aren't just "sad." They're living a life so tortured and horrible that they would literally wish they were dead.

Your mental picture of that situation is wrong, you shouldn't be thinking of executing an innocent person for the horrible crime of being sad. You should be thinking of a cancer patient ravaged by disease whose every moment is agony, and who is begging you to kill them and end their suffering. Both total and average utilitarianism agree that honoring their request and killing them is the right thing to do.

Of course, helping the tortured person recover, so that their future is full of positive utility instead of negative, is much much better than killing them.

No. Our goal is to make people have much more happiness than sadness in their lives, not no sadness at all. I've done things that make me moderately sad because they will later make me extremely happy.

In more formal terms, suppose that sadness is measured in negative utilons, and happiness in utilons. Suppose I am a happy person who will have 50 utilons. The only other person on Earth is a sad person with -10 utilons. The average utility is then 20 utilons.

Suppose I help the sad person. I endure -5 utilons of sadness in order to give the sad person 20 utilons of happiness. I now have 45 utilons, the sad person has 10. Now the average utility is 27.5. A definite improvement.

This sounds interesting for cases where both parties are economically secure.

However I can't see it working in my case since my housemates each earn somewhere around ten times what I do. Under this system, my bids would always be lowest and I would do all the chores without exception. While I would feel unable to turn down this chance to earn money, my status would drop from that of an equal to that of a servant. I would find this unacceptable.

I think the empirical claims of feminism are now successful, but they did exist.

I can't seem to parse this literally. Do you mean that some past empirical claims of feminism are no longer true do the success of the political advocacy of feminism? That seems true (with some controversy on the degree of 'some').

Okay, I think I get where our source of disagreement is. I usually think about population in a timeless sense when considering problems like this. So once someone is created they always count as part of the population, even after they die.

Thinking in this timeless framework allows me to avoid a major pitfall of average utilitarianism, namely the idea that you can raise the moral value of a population by killing its unhappiest members.

So in my moral framework (B) is not coherent. If those people were created at any point the world can be said to contain them, even if they're dead now.