People who donate to charities generally don't have population growth as an explicit goal, so at first it seems like a total utilitarian EA should act very differently. However, a lot of the most effective charities, as judged by GiveWell, are public health initiatives which greatly increase average QALYs

Public health initiatives lower population growth.

If children are less likely to die, women get fewer of them.

A total utilitarian would tend to deprioritize educational initiatives; there's an inverse correlation between education and number of offspring.

JonahSinick thinks that EAs with "unusual values" might benefit more from earning to give, but this seems strange to me, since there's unlikely to be an effective charity working toward goals that few people share.

My explanation for that would be "if few people share your values, it will be harder for you to convince other people to give you money to pursue that value," which suggests that by earning and then funding work towards that value, you can do more. I do suspect that most unusual causes are funding limited.

1. Your donations if you were an EA acting according to your own values,

I don't think this question is well formed. Unless you were being altruistic, you're not an EA. If your own values are altruistic, then "your own values" doesn't add anything to "EA"

2 How the typical person you know would donate if they were an EA,

The typical person isn't an EA. Their becoming an EA involves such a massive change it isn't clear that their pre-EA values would have much effect. Should by being a Sunni or a Shi'ite change what the most effective way of helping people is?

3 How an average-utilitarian EA would donate

Average-utilitarian EAs will want to do crazy things like continually murder unhappy people until only one, superbly happy (and probably sadistic, to be happy in such a scenario) person was left. Total utilitarianism is the default brand of utilitarianism.

I'm not entirely sure whether you

• propose QALYs as a means to optimize a total utilitarians goals or
• discuss what you as a total utilitarian could do best to optimize this goal or
• something else related to both

I assume the former because you wrote

I chose them because I wanted the social welfare function to be relatively easy to calculate.

In general if you choose any oversimplified scheme to optimize for you will not earn what you want. What gets measured gets optimized.

The following quotes are from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

QALYs are empirically known to be oversimplified and more a theoretical economists tool to derive general optimization potential that a precise tool.

The four theoretical assumptions underlying QALYs are invalid (quality of life should be measured in consistent intervals; life years and QOL should be independent; people should be neutral about risk; and willingness to sacrifice life years should be constant over time).

They are neither recommended for individual health care decisions where they

place[s] disproportionate importance on physical pain or disability over mental health. The effects of a patient's health on the quality of life of others [..] do not figure into these calculations.

nor on the population as an aggregate where

the weight assigned to a particular condition can vary greatly, depending on the population being surveyed.

Also if you want to use it as a tool to personally rate some means you should consider that

those who do not suffer from the affliction in question will, on average, overestimate the detrimental effect on quality of life, compared to those who are afflicted.

So I propose that you choose a more elaborate tool set if you want to optimize a complex goal. Otherwise you fall into the same trap as you wat to avoid from UFAI: Overoptimizing oversimple goals.