Thanks for this, very enlightening! A very good framing and analysis of my beliefs.
But maybe I misunderstand how he arrives at the belief that "wrong" can be a one-place predicate.
Yeah. While I'm reasonably confident that he holds the belief, I have no confidence in any theories how he arrives at that belief.
What I have gotten from his writing on the subject is a combination of "Well, it sure seems that way to me," and "Well, if that isn't true, then I don't see any way to build a superintelligence that does the right thing, and there has to be a way to build a superintelligence that does the right thing.&quo...
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.