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.
I don't think that's right, or EY's position (I'd like evidence on that). Who's to say that maximization is precisely what's right? That might be a very good heuristic, but upon reflection the AI might decide to self-improve in a way that changes this subgoal (of the overall decision problem that includes all the other decision-making parts), by finding considerations that distinguish maximizing attitude to utility and the right attitude to utility. It would of course use its current utility-maximizing algorithm to come to that decision. But the conclusion might be that too much maximization is bad for environment or something. The AI would stop maximizing for the reason it's not the most maximizing thing, the same way as a person would not kill for the reason that action leads to a death, even though avoid-causing-death is not the whole morality and doesn't apply universally.
See also this comment.