Nick Szabo on acting on extremely long odds with claimed high payoffs:
Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The name comes of course from the infinite-reward Wager proposed by Pascal: these days the large-but-finite versions are far more pernicious). Naive expected value reasoning implies that they are worth the effort: if the odds are 1 in 1,000 that I could win $1 billion, and I am risk and time neutral, then I should expend up to nearly $1 million dollars worth of effort to gain this boon. The problems with these beliefs tend to be at least threefold, all stemming from the general uncertainty, i.e. the poor information or lack of information, from which we abstracted the low probability estimate in the first place: because in the messy real world the low probability estimate is almost always due to low or poor evidence rather than being a lottery with well-defined odds.
Nick clarifies in the comments that he is indeed talking about singularitarians, including his GMU colleague Robin Hanson. This post appears to revisit a comment on an earlier post:
In other words, just because one comes up with quasi-plausible catastrophic scenarios does not put the burden of proof on the skeptics to debunk them or else cough up substantial funds to supposedly combat these alleged threats.
So the choice then would be whether to give the potential sockpuppet the benefit of the doubt and allow treatment of them to asymptotically approach the treatment of known Dmytry accounts to the extent that and for as long as they make Dmytry-like posts and for as long as it looks like the comments could be anomalies. ie. There is the expectation of either a regression to the mean or that an actual new user will be capable of learning from feedback.
If it is assumed that the accounts are sockpuppets then they immediately get treated without the benefit of doubt and with the additional loading penalty given to sockpuppets for being sockpuppets.