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.
That's because for EY, "wrong" and "wrong_\human" mean the same thing. It's semantics. When you ask "is X right or wrong?" in the every day sense of the term, you are actually asking "is X right_human or wrong_human?" But if murder is wrong_human, that doesn't mean it's wrong_clippy, for example. In both cases you are just checking a utility function, but different utility functions give different answers.
It seems clear from the metaethics posts is that if a powerful alien race comes along and converts humanity into paperclip-maximizers, such that making many paperclips comes to be right_human, EY would say that making many paperclips doesn't therefore become right.
So it seems clear that at least under some circumstances, "wrong" and "wrong_human" don't mean the same thing for EY, and that at least sometimes EY would say that "is X right or wrong?" doesn't depend on what humans happen to want that day.
Now, if by "wrong_hum... (read more)