And how effectively do you think you can teach, having just boasted of how you wasted your readers' time being deliberately stupid at them?

Depends on whether they're looking to learn something, or looking for reasons not to learn something.

You might say: Aha, you learned my lesson. But, as it happens, I already knew.

Actually, you are entirely correct: You already knew. I did not, in fact, "mug" you. The mugging was not in the wasting of the readers' time, that was merely what was lost; it was a conceptual mugging. Every reader who kept insisting on fighting the hypothetical was mugged with each insistence. In real life, they would have kept sticking to the same "I must have planned this wrong" line of reasoning - your first response was that this was the wrong line of reasoning. Which is why I brought up mugging, and focused on that instead; it was a better line of conversation with you.

But my hypothetical situation was no worse than most hypothetical situations, I was simply more honest about it. Hypothetical situations are most usually created to manufacture no-win situations for specific kinds of thought processes. This was no different.