First, is ethics only about decision procedures? The existence of the concept of moral luck suggests not.
It may not surprise you to learn that I am of the school that rejects the concept of moral luck. (In this I think I align with Eliezer.)
Meta-ethics is about issues that are logically prior to ethics
This is unobjectionable provided that one agrees about what ethics consists of. As far as I am aware, standard philosophical terminology labels utilitarianism (for example) as an ethical theory; yet I have seen people on LW refer to "utilitarian meta-ethics". This is the kind of usage I mean to disapprove of, and I hold Eliezer under suspicion of encouraging it by blurring the distinction in his sequence.
I should be clear about the fact that this is a terminological issue; my interest here is mainly in preserving the integrity of the prefix "meta", which I think has suffered excessive abuse both here and elsewhere. For whatever reason, Eliezer's use of the term felt abusive to me.
Part of the problem may be that Eliezer seemed to think the concept of rigid designation was the important issue, as opposed to e.g. the orthogonality thesis, and I found this perplexing (and uncharacteristic of him). Discomfort about this may have contributed to my perception that meta-ethics wasn't really the topic of his sequence, so that his calling it that was "off". But this is admittedly distinct from my claim that his thesis is ethical rather than meta-ethical.
Going back to Eliezer, I think that he does only cover meta-ethical claims and that they do pin down an ethical theory. Maybe other meta-ethical stances would not uniquely do so (contrary to my previous comment), but his do.
This is again a terminological point, but I think a sequence should be named after the conclusion rather than the premises. If his meta-ethical stance pins down an ethical theory, he should have called the sequence explaining it his "ethics" sequence; just as if I use my theory of art history to derive my theory of physics, then my sequence explaining it should be my "physics" sequence rather than my "art history" sequence.
You demand that everyone accept your definition of ethics, excluding moral luck from the subject, but you simultaneously demand that meta-ethics be defined by convention.
I said both of those points (but not their conjunction) in my previous comment, after explicitly anticipating what you say here and I'm rather annoyed that you ignored it. I guess the lesson is to say as little as possible.
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: