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.
He did, by implication, in describing what it's like if nothing is:
Clearly, many of the items on EY's list, such as fun, humor, and justice, require the existence of valuers. The question above then amounts to whether all items of moral goodness require the existence of valuers. I think the question merits an answer, even if (see below) it might not be the one lukeprog is most curious about.
Unfortunately, lukeprog changed the terms in the middle of the discussion. Not that there is anything wrong with the new question (and I like EY's answer).