A whole lot of arguments on LW seem silly to outsiders. I just got finished arguing that it's okay to kill people to take their organs (or rather, that it's okay to do so in a hypothetical situation that may not really be possible).

That debate is shared with academic ethics as, IIRC, a standard scenario given as criticism of some forms of utilitarian ethics, is it not? I think that's a mitigating factor. It may sound funny to discuss 'quarks' (quark quark quark! funny sound, isn't it?) or 'gluons' but that also is borrowed from an academic field.