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.
What scares me is that people say EY's position is "plainly false" so rarely. Even if EY is almost always right, you would still expect a huge number of people to say that his positions are plainly false, especially when talking about such difficult and debated questions as those of philosophy and predicting the future.
What scares me is how often people express this concern relative to how often people actually agree with EY. Eliezer's beliefs and assertions take an absolute hammering. I agree with him fairly often - no surprise, he is intelligent, has a similar cognitive style mine and has spent a whole lot of time thinking. But I disagree with him vocally whenever he seems wrong. I am far from the only person who does so.