I certainly don't disagree that there are a number of unlikely hypotheticals here that together are very improbable.
My impression from reading had been that, while the typical black hole that would be created by LHC would have too high momentum relative to Earth, there would be a distribution and with reasonably high probability at least one hole (per year, say) would accidentally have sufficiently low momentum relative to Earth. I can't immediately find that calculation though.
If P(black holes lose charge | black holes don't Hawking-radiate) is very low, then it becomes more reasonable to skip over the white dwarf part of the argument. Still, in that case, it seems like an honest summary of the argument would have to mention this point, given that it's a whole lot less obvious than the point about different momenta. G & M seem to have thought it non-crazy enough to devote a few sections of paper to the possibility.
Even producing a black hole per year is doubtful under our current best guesses, but if one of a few extra-dimension TOEs are right (possible) we could produce them. So there's sort of no "typical" black hole produced by the LHC.
But you're right, you could make a low-momentum black hole with some probability if the numbers worked out. I don't know how to calculate what the rate would be, though - it would probably involve gory details of the particular TOE. 1 per year doesn't sound crazy, though, if they're possible.
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?