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Will_Newsome comments on Intellectual Hipsters and Meta-Contrarianism - Less Wrong
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This suggests that a common tactic (deliberate or otherwise) would be to represent your opponents as being the level below you, rather than the level above. For example this article, which treats Singularitarians as at level 1, rather than level 3, on
technology is great! -> but it has costs, like to the enviroment, and making social control easier -> Actually, the benefits vastly outweigh those.
Ironically, it's not that far off for SIAI, which is at level 4, 'certain technologies are existentially dangerous'
This seems to hold true for all the triads you mention, except possibly the medicine one: level 2 people falsely represent level 3 people as level 1.
Existentially dangerous doesn't mean the benefits still don't outweigh the costs. If there's a 95% chance that uFAI kills us all, that's still a whopping 5% chance at unfathomably large amounts of utility. Technology still ends up having been a good idea after all.
Each level adds necessary nuance. Unfortunately, at each level is a new chance for unnecessary nuance. Strong epistemic rationality is the only thing that can shoulder the weight of the burdensome details.
Added: Your epistemic rationality is limited by your epistemology. There's a whole bunch of pretty and convincing mathematics that says Bayesian epistemology is the Way. We trust in Bayes because we trust in that math: the math shoulders the weight. A question, then. When is Bayesianism not the ideal epistemology? As humans the answer is 'limited resources'. But what if you had unlimited resources? At the limit, where doesn't Bayes hold?