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kalium comments on Personal examples of semantic stopsigns - Less Wrong Discussion
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I don't see how this is worse than any other probability estimate when a simple calculation with good numbers isn't available. Do you consider "probably", "unlikely", or "almost certainly" to be semantic stopsigns as well? Would it be better to say "very unlikely" or "with extremely low probability"?
When people act as if the probability of a certain event were zero but try to pacify the reader by using a fake zero called epsilon instead ("Oh, epsilon is very small but non-zero, so I suppose it's OK"), they consciously or subconsciously throw a semantic stop sign ("I don't want to be called on this").
I think they're saying they don't want to be nit picked with irrelevant objections. "Huh, you could be living in the Matrix. You can't rule that out. There's not zero probability of that, blah blah blah..."
Ah, my social circle's idiom seems to use epsilon as anything that is tiny but not infinitesimal (for instance, children are called epsilons because they are small). If LW usage is closer to its roots and tries to sneak in the notion of an arbitrarily small quantity instead of a merely tiny one, that's different, but I'm not sure I'd notice the difference in practice.