Eliezer's metaethics says only maximize your own utility.
Isn't that bog-standard ethical egoism? If that is the case, then I really misunderstood the sequences.
Maybe. Sometimes ethical egoism sounds like it says that you should be selfish. If that's the case, than no, they are not the same. But sometimes it just sounds like it says you should do whatever you want to do, even if that includes helping others. If that's the case, they sound the same to me.
edit: Actually, that's not quite right. On the second version, egoism give the same answer as EY's metaethics for all agents who have "what is right" as their terminal values, but NOT for any other agent. Egoism in this sense defines "should" ...
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.