Because of conservation of both momentum and energy, particles coming out of the LHC are no slouch either. So although under extremely hypothetical conditions, stable black holes can exist without the sun being destroyed by cosmic rays, even then you need to add even more hypotheticals to make the LHC dangerous.
Note that their very hypothetical scenario is already discouraged by many orders of magnitude by Occam's razor. I'm not sure what the simplest theory that doesn't have black holes radiate but does have pair production near them is, but it's probably really complicated. And then these guys push it even further by requiring that these black hole-like objects not destroy neutron stars either!
I certainly don't disagree that there are a number of unlikely hypotheticals here that together are very improbable.
My impression from reading had been that, while the typical black hole that would be created by LHC would have too high momentum relative to Earth, there would be a distribution and with reasonably high probability at least one hole (per year, say) would accidentally have sufficiently low momentum relative to Earth. I can't immediately find that calculation though.
If P(black holes lose charge | black holes don't Hawking-radiate) is very low, ...
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?