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.
This strikes me as an ill-formed question for reasons I tried to get at in No License To Be Human. When Gary asks "What is right?" he is asking the question e.g. "What state of affairs will help people have more fun?" and not "What state of affairs will match up with the current preferences of Gary's brain?" and the proof of this is that if you offer Gary a pill to change his preferences, Gary won't take it because this won't change what is right. Gary's preferences are about things like fairness, not about Gary's preferences. Asking what justifies should_Gary to Gary is either answered by having should_Gary wrap around and judge itself ("Why, yes, it does seem better to care about fairness than about one's own desires") or else is a malformed question implying that there is some floating detachable ontologically basic property of rightness, apart from particular right things, which could be ripped loose of happiness and applied to pain instead and make it good to do evil.
Shouldness does incorporate a concept of reflective equilibrium (people recognize apparent changes in their own preferences as cases of being "mistaken"), but should_Gary makes no mention of Gary (except insofar as Gary's welfare is one of Gary's terminal values) but instead is about a large logical function which explicitly mentions things like fairness and beauty. This large function is rightness which is why Gary knows that you can't change what is right by messing with Gary's brain structures or making Gary want to do something else.
You can arrive at a concise metaethical understanding of what sort of thing shouldness is. It is not possible to concisely write out the large function that any particular human refers to by "should", which is why all attempts at definition seem to fall short; and since for any particular definition it always seems like "should" is detachable from that definition, this reinforces the false impression that "should" is an undefinable extra supernatural property a la Moore's Open Question.
By far the hardest part of naturalistic metaethics is getting people to realize that it changes absolutely nothing about morals or emotions, just like the fact of a deterministic physical universe never had any implications for the freeness of our will to begin with.
I also note that although morality is certainly not written down anywhere in the universe except human brains, what is written is not about human brains, it is about things like fairness; nor is it written that "being written in a human brain" grants any sort of normative status. So the more you talk about "fulfilling preferences", the less the subject matter of what you are discussing resembles the subject matter that other people are talking about when they talk about morality, which is about how to achieve things like fairness. But if you built a Friendly AI, you'd build it to copy "morality" out of the brains where that morality is written down, not try to manually program in things like fairness (except insofar as you were offering a temporary approximation explicitly defined as temporary). It is likewise extremely hard to get people to realize that this level of indirection, what Bostrom terms "indirect normativity", is as close as you can get to getting any piece of physical matter to compute what is right.
If you want to talk about the same thing other people are talking about when they talk about what's right, I suggest consulting William Frankena's wonderful list of some components of the large function:
"Life, consciousness, and activity; health and strength; pleasures and satisfactions of all or certain kinds; happiness, beatitude, contentment, etc.; truth; knowledge and true opinions of various kinds, understanding, wisdom; beauty, harmony, proportion in objects contemplated; aesthetic experience; morally good dispositions or virtues; mutual affection, love, friendship, cooperation; just distribution of goods and evils; harmony and proportion in one's own life; power and experiences of achievement; self-expression; freedom; peace, security; adventure and novelty; and good reputation, honor, esteem, etc."
(Just wanted to quote that so that I didn't entirely fail to talk about morality in between all this stuff about preferences and metaethics.)
Damn. I still haven't had my "Aha!" moment on this. I'm glad that ata, at least, appears to have it, but unfortunately I don't understand ata's explanation, either.
I'll understand if you run out of patience with this exercise, but I'm hoping you won't, because if I can come to understand your meta-ethical theory, then perhaps I will be able to explain it to all the other people on Less Wrong who don't yet understand it, either.
Let me start by listing what I think I do understand about your views.
1. Human values are complex. As a result of evoluti... (read more)