What difference would CEV make from a universe in which a Paperclip Maximizer equipped everyone with the desire to maximize paperclips? Of what difference is a universe with as many discrete consciousness entities as possible from one with a single universe-spanning consciousness?
If a paperclip maximizer modified everyone such that we really only valued paperclips and nothing else, and we then ran CEV, then CEV would produce a powerful paperclip maximizer. This is... I'm not going to say it's a feature, but it's not a bug, at least. You can't expect CEV to generate accurate information about morality if you erase morality from the minds it's looking at. (You could recover some information about morality by looking at history, or human DNA (if the paperclip maximizer didn't modify that), etc., but then you'd need a strategy other than CEV.)
I don't think I understand your second question.
I don't see how you can argue that the question "What is right?" is about the state of affairs that will help people to have more fun and yet claim that you don't think that "it makes any moral difference whether a paperclip maximizer likes paperclips"
That depends on whether the paperclip maximizer is sentient, whether it just makes paperclips or it actually enjoys making paperclips, etc. If those are the case, then its preferences matter... a little. (So let's not make one of those.)
That depends on whether the paperclip maximizer is sentient, whether it just makes paperclips or it actually enjoys making paperclips, etc.
All those concepts seem to be vague. To be sentient, to enjoy. Do you need to figure out how to define those concepts mathematically before you'll be able to implement CEV? Or are you just going to let extrapolated human volition decide about that? If so, how can you possible make claims about how valuable, or how much the preference of a paperclip maximizer matter? Maybe it will all turn out to be wireheading in the...
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.