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.
Richard,
You're speaking my language, thanks! I hope this is EY's view, because I know what this means. Maybe now I can go back and read EY's sequence in light of this interpretation and it will make more sense to me now.
EY's theory as presented above makes me suspicious that making basic evaluative moral terms rigid designators is a kind of 'trick' which, though perhaps not intended, very easily has the effect of carrying along some common absolutist connotations of those terms where they no longer apply in EY's use of those terms.
At the moment, I'm not so worried about objection (1), but objections (2) and (3) are close to what bother me about EY's theory, especially if this is foundational for EY's thinking about how we ought to be designing a Friendly AI. If we're working on a project as important as Friendly AI, it becomes an urgent problem to get our meta-ethics right, and I'm not sure Eliezer has done it yet. Which is why we need more minds working on this problem. I hope to be one of those minds, even if my current meta-ethics turns out to be wrong (I've held my current meta-ethics for under 2 years, anyway, and it has shifted slightly since adoption).
But, at the moment it remains plausible to me that Eliezer is right, and I just don't see why right now. Eliezer is a very smart guy who has invested a lot of energy into training himself to think straight about things and respond to criticism either with adequate counterargument or by dropping the criticized belief.
Maybe; I can't say I've noticed that so much myself -- e.g. he just disappeared from this discussion when I refuted his assumptions about philosophy of language (that underpin his objection to zombies), but I haven't seen him retract his claim that zombies are demonstrably incoherent.