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.
What difference would CEV make from a universe in which a Paperclip Maximizer equipped everyone with the desire to maximize paperclips? Of what difference is a universe with as many discrete consciousness entities as possible from one with a single universe-spanning consciousness?
If it doesn't make any difference, then how can we be sure that the SIAI won't just implement the first fooming AI with whatever terminal goal it desires?
I don't see how you can argue that the question "What is right?" is about the state of affairs that will help people to have more fun and yet claim that you don't think that "it makes any moral difference whether a paperclip maximizer likes paperclips"
If a paperclip maximizer modified everyone such that we really only valued paperclips and nothing else, and we then ran CEV, then CEV would produce a powerful paperclip maximizer. This is... I'm not going to say it's a feature, but it's not a bug, at least. You can't expect CEV... (read more)