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wedrifid comments on Emotional Basilisks - Less Wrong
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As the person creating the hypothetical you had the opportunity to construct it such that there was no good reason to fight it. While I'm not going to make any claims about atheistic beliefs myself I would not consider those who chose to fight the hypothetical to be making an error. Mixing real things with fictional evidence has an impact on what people believe even if you tell them "this is merely a question of [abstraction]".
Do you have a better example in mind?
(I might have considered using something generic such as “some piece of information”, but I suspect such a post would be received very badly by LW readers, because reasons.)
But yeah, generally speaking (I'm not talking about this post in particular -- I personally had no trouble semi-automatically mentally replacing “atheism” with “some piece of information”), reading Americans write stuff like that about atheism when I happen to live in a continent where a sizeable fraction of people (probably a majority of people in my generation) are atheists and the sky hasn't fallen yet feels quite weird. (Same for other things American conservatives oppose, such as gun control.)
No, not off the top of my head. I also don't particularly object to using this example. I do oppose prohibitions on fighting the hypothetical. Making this choice of hypothetical represents a form of influence. Persuasion that is immune to rebuttal is (usually) undesirable for epistemic purposes.
And that's not even the worst example that's been on LW! :-)