You don't think an argument that something which you thought was certain is actually confusing is valuable? If an agnostic convinced a fundamentalist that God's existence was less cut-and-dried obvious than the fundamentalist had always thought, but admitted ey wasn't really sure about the God question emself, wouldn't that still be a useful service?
This reads to me as an admission that you were not, nor were you intending to, at any point say anything useful or interesting about the LHC. This suggests that if you want people not to feel like you're wasting their time and leading them on a merry dance rather than talking about the apparent topic of discussion (which is how I feel now - well and properly trolled. Well done.) then you may want to pick examples where you don't have to hope no-one ever asks "so what is the point of all this bloviating?"
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?