http://lesswrong.com/lw/n3/circular_altruism/

And calling people hypocrites because things like involuntary organ donation gives them "cognitive dissonance" is absurd. Also regarding hypocrisy, note that Yudkowski works for an organization whose goal is to protect humanity from Skynet, while people in Africa are starving. (I'm not personally attacking him, he can work on whatever he likes, and I think governments of wealthy nations have both the resources and responsibility to alleviate starvation, and individual efforts are mostly pissing in the wind. But parent poster brought up sweatshops &c. so I went there.)

I'm unwilling to post spoilers, which makes this unfairly undiscussable, but the meaning of the original prophecy did not--could not--come down to rationalism and could not for reasons that were repeated a few times through the fic. I can't tell if this was intentional on Yudkowsky's part, and I don't really care, since it really changes nothing about everything else.

For the record, though, when I disparage utilitarianism, I promise it isn't just "Eliezer's".

No, they've said "this is a reductio ad absurdum, perhaps reality is a bit more complicated than that." You don't get to assert your assumption - that simplistic utilitarianism works as advertised - as evidence.

Consider, for instance, minmaxing as an alternative. (Like real-life AI work tends to.) What answer does that give?