I remain confused by Eliezer's metaethics sequence.
Both there and in By Which It May Be Judged, I see Eliezer successfully arguing that (something like) moral realism is possible in a reductionist universe (I agree), but he also seems to want to say that in fact (something like) moral realism actually obtains, and I don't understand what the argument for that is. In particular, one way (the way?) his metaethics might spit up something that looks a lot like moral realism is if there is strong convergence of values upon (human-ish?) agents receiving better information, time enough to work out contradictions in their values, etc. But the "strong convergence of values" thesis hasn't really been argued, so I remain unclear as to why Eliezer finds it plausible.
Basically, I read the metaethics sequence as asserting both things but arguing only for the first.
But I'm not sure about this. Perhaps because I was already familiar with the professional metaethics vocabulary when I read the sequence, I found Eliezer's vocabulary for talking about positions in metaethics confusing.
I meant to explore these issues in a vocabulary I find more clear, in my own metaethics sequence, but I still haven't got around to it. :(
(I'm putting this as a reply to your comment because your comment is what made me think of it.)
In my view, Eliezer's "metaethics" sequence, despite its name, argues for his ethical theory, roughly
(1) morality[humans] = CEV[humans]
(N.B.: this is my terminology; Eliezer would write "morality" where I write "morality[humans]") without ever arguing for his (implied) metaethical theory, which is something like
(2) for all X, morality[X] = CEV[X].
Worse, much of his effort is spent arguing against propositions like
(3) (1) => for...
There seems to be a widespread impression that the metaethics sequence was not very successful as an explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's views. It even says so on the wiki. And frankly, I'm puzzled by this... hence the "apparently" in this post's title. When I read the metaethics sequence, it seemed to make perfect sense to me. I can think of a couple things that may have made me different from the average OB/LW reader in this regard: