It didn't seem terribly compelling to me, but whether that was a failure of understanding or not I can't really say.
For my own part, I'm perfectly content to say that we care about what we (currently) care about because we care about it, so all of this "moral miracle" stuff about how what we (currently) care about really is special seems unnecessary. I can sort of understand why it's valuable rhetorically when engaging with people who really want some kind of real true specialness in their values, but I mostly think such people should get over it.
I also tend to doubt that "what humanity currently cares about" is as internally consistent and coherently extrapolatable as much of the moral philosophy in the Sequences and elsewhere on this site would seem to imply.
For my own part, I'm perfectly content to say that we care about what we (currently) care about because we care about it, so all of this "moral miracle" stuff about how what we (currently) care about really is special seems unnecessary.
It is equally correct to say we believe what we believe, that doesn't make our beliefs true.
There seems to be a widespread impression that the metaethics sequence was not very successful as an explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's views. It even says so on the wiki. And frankly, I'm puzzled by this... hence the "apparently" in this post's title. When I read the metaethics sequence, it seemed to make perfect sense to me. I can think of a couple things that may have made me different from the average OB/LW reader in this regard: