I find it interesting that our intuition clashes so. I immediately found RL's account compelling on the basis, whereas others did not. This could be a case of different labelling, or even different emotional experience.

The weirdest thing is that I do have the intuition "corresponding" (FLOABW) to the fact that if deterring someone from doing something can work in principle it might be a good idea to try but if it cannot possibly work it makes no sense to try (the "Sympathy or Condemnation" section of the "Diseased thinking" post makes perfect sense to me); when Mencius Moldbug pointed out that people react differently to the threat of anthropogenic global warning differently to the way they'd react to hypothetical global warning due to the Sun, I knew exactly what he was talking about. But, Rob Lyman's example is a very poor choice of a pointer to that intuition for me, exactly because it points me to stuff like stubbing a toe in the dark instead.