The main reason for why I was able to abandon religion was to realize that what I want implies what is right. That still feels intuitively right. I didn't expect to see many people on LW to argue that there exist preference/(agent/mind)-independent moral statements like 'it is right to help people' or 'killing is generally wrong'.
It is useful to think of right and wrong as being some agent's preferences. That agent doesn't have to be you - or even to exist IRL. If you are a sadist (no slur intended) you might want to inflict pain - but that would not make it "right" - in the eyes of conventional society.
It is fairly common to use "right" and "wrong" to describe society-level preferences.
If you are a sadist (no slur intended) you might want to inflict pain - but that would not make it "right" - in the eyes of conventional society.
Why would a sadistic Boltzmann brain conclude that it is wrong to be a sadistic Boltzmann brain? Whatever some society thinks is completely irrelevant to an agent with outlier preferences.
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.