FWIW, cultural evolution is not an analogy. Culture literally evolves - via differential reproductive success of memes...
Do you have recommendations for people/books that take this perspective seriously and then go on to explore interesting things with it? I haven't seen anyone include the memetic perspective as part of their everyday worldview besides some folk at SIAI and yourself, which I find pretty sad.
Also, I get the impression you have off-kilter-compared-to-LW views on evolutionary biology, though I don't remember any concrete examples. Do you have links to somewhere where I could learn more about what phenomena/perspectives you think aren't emphasized or what not?
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.