In the above examples, there may well be more net harm than gain from staying in an unpleasant relationship or firing a problematic employee. It's pretty case-by-case in nature, and you're not required to ignore your own feelings entirely. If not, yes, utilitarianism would say you'd be "wrong" for indulging yourself at the expense of others.

The same reason fat people can derail trolleys and businesspeople have lifeguard abilities, I'd imagine.

You pretty much got it. Eliezer's predicting that response and saying, no, they're really not the same thing. (Tu quoque)

EDIT: Never mind, I thought it was a literal question.

We encourage you to downvote any comment that you'd rather not see more of - please don't feel that this requires being able to give an elaborate justification. -LW Wiki Deletion Policy

Folks are encouraged to downvote liberally on LW, but the flip-side of that is that people will downvote where they might otherwise just move on for fear of offending someone or getting into an argument that doesn't interest them. You might want to be less sensitive if someone brings one of your posts to -1 - it's not really an act of aggression.

I sympathize. One of my professors jokes about having discovered a new optical illusion, then going to the literature and having the incredible good luck that for once nobody else discovered it first.

This all seems to have more to do with rule consequentialism than deontology. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and rule consequentialism has indeed been considered a halfway point between deontology and act consequentialism, but it's worth noting.

Disliking meetings and reading in a crowded environment doesn't seem like much evidence that you're neither introverted nor extroverted (except that you're not one of Those Nasty Extraverts that keep supposedly fawning over meetings), which doesn't seem like much evidence that the introvert/extrovert split isn't helpful. I can't enjoy parties or meetings, prefer to read in silence and work alone.

In accordance with ancient tradition, I took the survey.

If I unpacked "disbelieves in God" to "has not encountered a concept of God they both believed ("did not disbelieve", if you prefer) and did not consider a silly conception of God", would atheism still be meaningless? Would that be a horrible misconception of atheism?

Are you sure there's nothing bundled in with "God is Reality" beyond what you state? Let's say I said "God is Reality. Reality is not sapient and has never given explicit instructions on anything." Would you consider that consistent with your belief that God equals Reality?

I'm not trying for Socratic Method arguing here, I'm just not quite sure where you're coming from.

As a psychology student, I can say with some certainty that Watson is a behaviorist poster boy.