Eliezer believes that you desire to do what is right. It is important to remember that what is right has nothing to do with whether you desire it. [...] Moral goals should be pursued. Even if society condones that which is wrong, it is still wrong. Studying the human brain is necessary in order to learn more about morality.
How is this helpful? Here is how I would paraphrase the above (as I understand it):
Human brains cause human action through an ambivalent decision process.
What does this tell about wireheading? I think wireheading might increase pleasure but at the same time feel that it would be wrong. So? All that means is that I have complex and frequently ambivalent preferences and that I use an inaccurate and ambivalent language to describe them. What important insight am I missing?
The important thing about wireheading in this context is that desires after being wireheaded do not matter. The pleasure is irrelevant for this purpose; we could just as easily imagine humans being wireheaded to feel pain, but to desire continuing to feel pain. The point is that what is right should be pursued because it is right, not because people desire it. People's desires are useful as a way of determining what is right, but if it is known that people desires were altered in some way, they stop providing evidence as to what is right. This understanding is essential to a superintelligence considering the best way to alter peoples brains.
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.