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.
After trying to read No License To Be Human I officially give up reading the sequences for now and postpone it until I learnt a lot more. I think it is wrong to suggest that anyone can read the sequences. Either you've to be a prodigy or a post-graduate. The second comment on that post expresses my own feelings, can people actually follow Yudkowsky's posts? It's over my head.
I agree with you sentiment, but I suggest not giving up so easily. I have the same feeling after many sequence posts, but some of them that I groked were real gems and seriously affected my thinking.
Also, borrowing some advice on reading hard papers, it's re-reading that makes a difference.
Also, as my coach put it "the best stretching for doing sidekicks is actually doing sidekicks".