Datapoint: I didn't find Metaethics all that confusing, although I am not sure I agree with it.
It looks like he's implying that "h-right" is special among "right"s in that it can't be something else in another universe, but that looks wrong for simple reasons. It's also not obvious to me that h-right is a narrow cluster.
I had this impression too, and have more or less the same sort-of-objection to it. I say "sort of" because I don't find "h-right as a narrow cluster" obvious, but I don't find it obviously wrong either. It feels like it should be a testable question but I'm not sure how one would go about testing it, given how crap humans are at self-reporting their values and beliefs.
On edit: Even if h-right isn't a narrow cluster, I don't think it would make the argument inconsistent; it could still work if different parts of humanity have genuinely different values modeled as, say, h1-right , h2-right, etc. At that point I'm not sure the theory would be all that useful, though.
I say "sort of" because I don't find "h-right as a narrow cluster" obvious, but I don't find it obviously wrong either.
I think part of the issue is that "narrow" might not have an obvious reference point. But it seems to me that there is a natural one: a single decision-making agent. That is, one might say "it's narrow because the moral sense of all humans that have ever lived occupies a dot of measure 0 in the total space of all possible moral senses," but that seems far less relevant to me than the question of i...
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: