I don't think it would be fair to malign philosophers because they come up with outlandish scary scenarios that scare people with OCD sometimes. It's not like LW gives Roko significant air time or serious treatment (EY freaking out and deleting it was partially principle of the thing, partially the fear that somebody might follow this road of thought to come up with something more terrifying and he doesn't want to take the community there, etc) somebody doing this is generally taken as a sign of serious crankery.
(FWIW, I agree with the top parent post that the hyping of Bayes Theorem is one of the LW foibles. At least the presentation of it.)
It's less about the plausibility of the thought experiment, and more about typical online drama and hysteria that ensued, which sort of belies that LW is made up of mortals like you and me. They aren't hyper-rational machines, after all.
No one claims they are. In fact, if I was to name a single overarching theme of all lesswrong discussions, it would be the fallibility of human reasoning. How is having some reddit-like drama on an open internet forum even relevant?
ps. to belie is to contradict, whereas I think you meant the drama shows that LW is made up of mortals? Just making sure I understood you correctly.
"The subject matter that LessWrong considers is certainly unusual, but that alone should not be enough to call it arbitrary, questionable or outlandish."
"But let me tell you about the time LW experienced internet drama."
>I don't think it would be fair to malign philosophers because they come up with outlandish scary scenarios that scare people with OCD sometimes.
Actually, that sounds like a fine reason to malign philosophers. In order to consider "outlandish scary scenarios", you must first be quite sure that those scenarios are realistic. If they're not, then you're wasting everyone's time.
And yes, if your expected-utility expressions fail to converge because you believe in taking every Pascal's Wager/Mugging scenario into account, or because you don't believe in time, then you've attempted to take the limit of a nonconverging sequence and no amount of philosophizing will help.
I don't think it would be fair to malign philosophers because they come up with outlandish scary scenarios that scare people with OCD sometimes. It's not like LW gives Roko significant air time or serious treatment (EY freaking out and deleting it was partially principle of the thing, partially the fear that somebody might follow this road of thought to come up with something more terrifying and he doesn't want to take the community there, etc) somebody doing this is generally taken as a sign of serious crankery.
(FWIW, I agree with the top parent post that the hyping of Bayes Theorem is one of the LW foibles. At least the presentation of it.)