The hypothetical (P) is used to get people to draw some conclusions from it. These conclusions must,by definition, be logically implied by the original hypothetical or nobody would be able to make them, so you can describe them as being equivalent to P. Thus, all hypotheticals can be described, using your reasoning, as "Suppose P were true? Then P would be true!" Furthermore, that also means "given Euclid's premises, the sum of the angles of a triangle is 180 degrees" is a type of "Suppose P were true? Then P would be true!"--it begins with a P (Euclid's premises) and concludes something that is logically equivalent to P. I suggest that an argument which begins with P and ends with something logically equivalent to P cannot be usefully described as "Suppose P would be true? Then P would be true!" This makes OW's hypothetical legitimate.

If it isn't worth trying to persuade (whoever), he shouldn't have commented in the first place. There are -lots- of posts that go through Less Wrong. -That- one bothered him. Bothered him on a fundamental level. As it was intended to. I'll note that it bothered you too. It was intended to. And the parallel is... apt, although probably not in the way that you think. I'm not Dumbledore, in this parallel. As for his question? It's not meant for me. I wouldn't agonize over the choice, and no matter what decision I made, I wouldn't feel bad about it afterwards. I have zero issue considering the hypothetical, and find it an inelegant and blunt way of pitting two moral absolutes against one another in an attempt to force somebody else to admit to an ethical hierarchy. The fact that Eliezer himself described the baby eater hypothetical as one which must be fought is the intellectual equivalent to mining the road and running away; he, as far as I know, -invented- that hypothetical, he's the one who set it up as the ultimate butcher block for non-utilitarian ethical systems. "Some hypotheticals must be fought", in this context, just means "That hypothetical is dangerous". It isn't, really. It just requires giving up a single falsehood: That knowing the truth always makes you better off. That that which can be destroyed by the truth, should be. He already implicitly accepts that lesson; his endless fiction of secret societies keeping dangerous knowledge from the rest of society demonstrate this. The truth doesn't always make things better. The truth is a very amoral creature; it doesn't care if things are made better, or worse, it just is. To call -that- a dangerous idea is just stubbornness. Not to say there -isn't- danger in that post, but it is not, in fact, from the hypothetical.