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.
I made a personal list of top frequently-cited-yet-irritatingly-misleading EY posts:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l6/no_evolutions_for_corporations_or_nanodevices/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/iv/the_futility_of_emergence/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/l0/adaptationexecuters_not_fitnessmaximizers/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/rl/the_psychological_unity_of_humankind/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/y3/value_is_fragile/
I agree with the first one of those being bad.
Yes, if you're talking about corporations, you cannot use exactly the same math than you do if you're talking about evolutionary biology. But there are still some similarities that make it useful to know things about how selection works in evolutionary biology. Eliezer seems to be saying that if you want to call something "evolution", then it has to meet these strictly-chosen criteria that he'll tell you. But pretty much the only justification he offers is "if it doesn't meet these criteria, the... (read more)