It is done for AI research. The “real world scenarios” usually involve several powerful AIs, so depending on what you mean by “sci-fi” they might not apply. (Even if you don’t consider AIs sci-fi, the usual problem statements make lots of simplifying assumptions that are not necessarily realistic, like perfect guessing and things like that, but that’s just like ignoring friction in physics problems, nobody expects for the exact same thing to happen in practice.)
r/Fitness does a weekly "Moronic Monday", a judgment-free thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. I thought this seemed like a useful thing to have here - after all, the concepts discussed on LessWrong are probably at least a little harder to grasp than those of weightlifting. Plus, I have a few stupid questions of my own, so it doesn't seem unreasonable that other people might as well.