I catch your drift about the post deletion, and I think that there is a bit of neurosis in the way of secrecy and sometimes keeping order in questionable ways, but that wasn't what you brought up initially; you brought up the tendency to reason about moral dilemmas that are generally quite dark. I was merely pointing out that this seems like the norm in moral thought experiments, not just the norm on lesswrong. I might concede your point if you provide at least a few convincing counterexamples, I just haven't really seen any.
If anything, I worry more about the tendency to call deviations from lesswrong standards insane, as it seems to be more of an in-group/out-group bias than is usually admitted, though it might be improving.
Yeah, really what I find to be the ugliest thing about lesswrong by far is the sense of self-importance, which contributed to the post deletion quite a bit as well.
Maybe it's the combination of these factors that's the problem. When I read mainstream philosophical discourse about pushing a fat man in front of a trolley, it just seems like a goofy hypothetical example.
But lesswrong seems to believe that it carries the world on its shoulders, and that when they talk about deciding between torture and dust specks, or torture and alien invasion, or torture and...
I have been trying to absorb the Lesswrong near-consensus on cryonics/quantum mechanics/uploading, and I confess to being unpersuaded by it. I'm not hostile to cryonics; just indifferent, and having a bit of trouble articulating why the insights on identity that I have been picking up from the quantum mechanics sequence aren't compelling to me. I offer the following thought experiment in hopes that others may be able to present the argument more effectively if they understand the objection here.
Suppose that Omega appears before you and says, “All life on Earth is going to be destroyed tomorrow by [insert cataclysmic event of your choice here]. I offer you the chance to push this button, which will upload your consciousness to a safe place out of reach of the cataclysmic event, preserving all of your memories, etc. up to the moment you pushed the button and optimizing you such that you will be effectively immortal. However, the uploading process is painful, and because it interferes with your normal perception of time, your original mind/body will subjectively experience the time after you pushed the button but before the process is complete as a thousand years of the most intense agony. Additionally, I can tell you that a sufficient number of other people will choose to push the button that your uploaded existence will not be lonely.”
Do you push the button?
My understanding of the Lesswrong consensus on this issue is that my uploaded consciousness is me, not just a copy of me. I'm hoping the above hypothetical illustrates why I'm having trouble accepting that.