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.
Do you have recommendations for people/books that take this perspective seriously and then go on to explore interesting things with it? I haven't seen anyone include the memetic perspective as part of their everyday worldview besides some folk at SIAI and yourself, which I find pretty sad.
Also, I get the impression you have off-kilter-compared-to-LW views on evolutionary biology, though I don't remember any concrete examples. Do you have links to somewhere where I could learn more about what phenomena/perspectives you think aren't emphasized or what not?
My current project is a book on memetics. I also have a blog on memetics.
Probably the best existing book on the topic is The Meme Machine by Susan Blackmore.
I also maintain some memetics links, some memetics references, a memetics glossary - and I have a bunch of memetics videos.
In academia, memetics is typically called "cultural evolution". Probably the best book on that is "Not by Genes Alone".
Your "evolutionary biology" question is rather vague. The nearest thing that springs to mind is this. Common views on that topic a... (read more)