Thanks for this clarification.
I personally don't get that connotation from the term "preferences," but I'm sure others do.
Anyway, so... Eliezer distinguishes prudential oughts from moral oughts by saying that moral oughts are what we ought to do to satisfy some small subset of our preferences: preferences that we wouldn't want changed by an alien ray gun? I thought he was saying that I morally should_Luke do what will best satisfy a global consideration of my preferences.
No, no, no- I don't mean that what I pointed out was the only distinction or the fundamental distinction, just that there's a big honking difference in at least one salient way. I'm not speaking for Eliezer on what's the best way to carve up that cluster in concept-space.
In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.