You are being humorous, but here is the answer to your question: People are talking about it obliquely because they want to talk about it openly, but don't believe they can, without having their discussions disappear. LW is not a police state. Discussions are free and fearless, except for this one thing. And of course that makes people even more curious to test the boundaries and understand why, on this one topic, the otherwise sensible moderators think that "you can't handle the truth". We can seek a very loose historical analogy in the early days of nanotechnology. Somewhere I read that for several years, Eric Drexler was inhibited in talking about the concept, because he feared nanotechnology's destructive side. I don't know what actually happened at all, so let 's just be completely hypothetical. It's the early 1970s, and you're part of a little group who stumbled upon the idea of molecular machines. There are arguments that such machines could make abundance and immortality possible. There are also arguments that such machines could destroy the world. In the group, there are people who want to tell the world about nanotechnology, because of the first possibility; there are people who want to keep it all a secret, because of the second possibility; and there are people who are undecided or with intermediate positions. Now suppose we ask the question: Are the world-destroying nanomachines even possible? The nano-secrecy faction would want to inhibit public consideration of that question. But the nano-missionary faction might want to encourage such discussion, either to help the nano-secrecy faction get over its fears, or just to make further secrecy impossible. In such a situation, it would be very easy for the little group of nano-pioneers to get twisted and conflicted over this topic, in a way which to an outsider would look like a collective neurosis. The key structural element is that there is no-one outside the group presently competent to answer the que