The Quantum Physics Sequence is unusual in that normally, if someone writes 100,000(?) words explaining quantum mechanics for a general audience, they genuinely know the subject first: they have a physics degree, they have had an independent reason to perform a few quantum-mechanical calculations, something like that. It seems to me that Eliezer first got his ideas about quantum mechanics from Penrose's Emperor's New Mind, and then amended his views by adopting many-worlds, which was probably favored among people on the Extropians mailing list in the late 1990s. This would have been supplemented by some incidental study of textbooks, Feynman lectures, expository web pages... but nonetheless, that appears to be the extent of it. The progression from Penrose to Everett would explain why he presents the main interpretive choice as between wavefunction realism with objective collapse, and wavefunction realism with no collapse. His prose is qualitative just about everywhere, indicating that he has studied quantum mechanics just enough to satisfy himself that he has obtained a conceptual understanding, but not to the point of quantitative competence. And then he has undertaken to convey this qualitative conceptual understanding to other people who don't have quantitative competence in the subject, either.
I can recognize all this because I am also an autodidact and I have done comparable things. It's possible to do this and get away with making only a few incidental mistakes. But it is a very risky thing to do. You run a high risk of fooling yourself and then causing your audience to fool themselves too. This is especially the case in mathematical physics. Literally every day I see people asking questions on physics websites that are premised on wrong assumptions about physical theory. I don't mean questions where people say "is it really true that...", I mean questions where the questioner thinks they already understand some topic, and the question proceeds from this incorrect understanding, sometimes quite aggressively in tone (recently observed example).
My opinion about the Sequences is that someone who knows nothing about QM can learn from them, but it's worth getting a second opinion, even just from Wikipedia, since they present a rather ideological point of view. Also, when you read them, you're simply not hearing from someone who has used quantum mechanics professionally; you're hearing from an autodidact who thinks he figured out the gist of the subject - I'd say, very roughly, he gets about 75% of the basics, and the problems are more in what is omitted rather than what is described (e.g. nothing, that I recall, about the role of operators) - and who has decided that one prominent minority faction of opinion among physicists (the many-worlds enthusiasts) are the ones who have correctly discerned the implications of QM for the nature of reality. The fact that he espouses, as the one true interpretation, a point of view that is shared by some genuine physicists, does at least protect him from the accusation of complete folly. Nonetheless, I can tell you - as one autodidact judging another - he's backed the wrong horse. :-)
If you want an independent evaluation of the Sequences by physicists, I suggest that you post this as a question at Physics Stack Exchange. Ask what people think of them, and whether they can be trusted. There's a commenter there, Ron Maimon, who is the most readily available approximation to what you want. Maimon is quantitatively competent in all sorts of advanced physics, and he was once a MWI zealot. Now he's more positivistic, but MWI is still his preferred language for making ontological sense of QM. I would expect him to offer qualified approval of the Sequences, but to make some astute comments regarding content or style.
Since it is a forum where everyone gets a chance to answer the question, with the best replies then being voted up by the readership, of course such a question would also lead to responses by people who don't believe MWI. But this is the quickest way to conduct the experiment you suggest.
My opinion about the Sequences is that someone who knows nothing about QM can learn from them, but it's worth getting a second opinion,
So why isnt that pointed out anywhere? EY seems oddly oblivious to his potential -- indeed likely -- limitations as an autodictat.
EDIT: Thanks to people not wanting certain words google-associated with LW: Phyg
Lesswrong has the best signal/noise ratio I know of. This is great. This is why I come here. It's nice to talk about interesting rationality-related topics without people going off the rails about politics/fail philosophy/fail ethics/definitions/etc. This seems to be possible because a good number of us have read the lesswrong material (sequences, etc) which innoculate us against that kind of noise.
Of course Lesswrong is not perfect; there is still noise. Interestingly, most of it is from people who have not read some sequence and thereby make the default mistakes or don't address the community's best understanding of the topic. We are pretty good about downvoting and/or correcting posts that fail at the core sequences, which is good. However, there are other sequences, too, many of them critically important to not failing at metaethics/thinking about AI/etc.
I'm sure you can think of some examples of what I mean. People saying things that you thought were utterly dissolved in some post or sequence, but they don't address that, and no one really calls them out. I could dig up a bunch of quotes but I don't want to single anyone out or make this about any particular point, so I'm leaving it up to your imagination/memory.
It's actually kindof frustrating seeing people make these mistakes. You could say that if I think someone needs to be told about the existence of some sequence they should have read before posting, I ought to tell them, but that's actually not what I want to do with my time here. I want to spend my time reading and participating in informed discussion. A lot of us do end up engaging mistaken posts, but that lowers the quality of discussion here because so much time and space has been spent battling ignorance instead of advancing knowledge and dicussing real problems.
It's worse than just "oh here's some more junk I have to ignore or downvote", because the path of least resistance ends up being "ignore any discussion that contains contradictions of the lesswrong scriptures", which is obviously bad. There are people who have read the sequences and know the state of the arguments and still have some intelligent critique, but it's quite hard to tell the difference between that and someone explaining for the millionth time the problem with "but won't the AI know what's right better than humans?". So I just ignore it all and miss a lot of good stuff.
Right now, the only stuff I can be resonably guaranteed is intelligent, informed, and interesting is the promoted posts. Everything else is a minefield. I'd like there to be something similar for discussion/comments. Some way of knowing "these people I'm talking to know what they are talking about" without having to dig around in their user history or whatever. I'm not proposing a particular solution here, just saying I'd like there to be more high quality discussion between more properly sequenced LWers.
There is a lot of worry on this site about whether we are too exclusive or too phygish or too harsh in our expectation that people be well-read, which I think is misplaced. It is important that modern rationality have a welcoming public face and somewhere that people can discuss without having read three years worth of daily blog posts, but at the same time I find myself looking at the moderation policy of the old sl4 mailing list and thinking "damn, I wish we were more like that". A hard-ass moderator righteously wielding the banhammer against cruft is a good thing and I enjoy it where I find it. Perhaps these things (the public face and the exclusive discussion) should be separated?
I've recently seen someone saying that no-one complains about the signal/noise ratio on LW, and therefore we should relax a bit. I've also seen a good deal of complaints about our phygish exclusivity, the politics ban, the "talk to me when you read the sequences" attitude, and so on. I'd just like to say that I like these things, and I am complaining about the signal/noise ratio on LW.
Lest anyone get the idea that no-one thinks LW should be more phygish or more exclusive, let me hereby register that I for one would like us to all enforce a little more strongly that people read the sequences and even agree with them in a horrifying manner. You don't have to agree with me, but I'd just like to put out there as a matter of fact that there are some of us that would like a more exclusive LW.