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.
The presence of a large, sharp, and serious audience. The disadvantage, of course, is that the audience tends not to already be familiar with standard philosophical jargon.
By contrast, at a typical philosophy blog, you can share your ideas with an audience that already knows the jargon, and is also sharp and serious. The disadvantage, of course, is that at the typical philosophy blog, the audience is not large.
These considerations suggest that a philosopher might wish to produce his own competing meta-ethics sequence here if he were in the early stages of producing a semi-popular book on his ideas. He might be less interested if he is interested only in presenting to trained philosophers.
(nods) That makes sense.