they consider Eliezer's treatment of frequentism / Bayesianism as something of a strawman and that there's no particular reason to paint them as two drastically differing camps when real statisticians are happy with using methods drawn from both.
In that case, we got very different impressions about how Eliezer described the two camps; here is what I heard: <channel righteous fury of Eliezer's pure Bayesian soul>
It's not Bayesian users on the one hand and Frequentists on the other, each despising the others' methods. Rather, it's the small group of epistemic statisticians and a large majority of instrumentalist ones.
The epistemics are the small band of AI researchers using statistical models to represent probability so as to design intelligence, learning, and autonomy. The idea is that ideal models are provably Baysian, and the task undertaken is to understand and implement close approximations of them.
The instrumentalist mainstream doesn't always claim that it's representing probability and doesn't feel lost without that kind of philosophical underpinning. Instrumentalists hound whatever problem is at hand with all statistical models and variables that they can muster to get the curve or isolated variable etc. they're looking for and think is best. The most important part of instrumentalist models is the statistician him or herself, which does the Bayesian updating adequately and without the need for understanding. </channel righteous fury of Eliezer's pure Bayesian soul>
Saying that the division is a straw man because most statisticians use all methods misses the point.
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.