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.
Is your difficulty in understanding how Eliezer thinks about ethics or in working out what side he fights for in various standardised intellectual battles? The first task seems fairly easy. He thinks like one would expect an intelligent reductionist programmer-type to think. Translating that into philosopher speak is somewhat more challenging.
I'm okay with Eliezer dismissing lots of standard philosophical categories as unhelpful and misleading. I have much the same attitude toward Anglophone philosophy. But anything he or someone else can do to help me understand what he is saying will be appreciated.