You lost me at ethical. The proposed situation is simple enough that you should define all the pieces and slap down your Schelling fences instead of trying to paste arbitrary labels on it.

Off the cuff: perhaps you've got it backwards?

I've thought about this as well, but my observation ended up going a different direction: work as a category only has higher utility because it's unfun in some way. Everyone else would rather be doing fun things, but the unfun stuff needed for survival still has to get done somehow. Work generally has higher utility because other people are willing to pay you to do it so they can do the fun things instead.

Omnivore:

1) This is two questions. I think that lowering the current level of meat consumption would probably improve health in America, but not by huge amounts. I don't have much evidence to back this belief in minor improvement, but there is a lot of evidence against it being a major improvement.

Regarding the planet, no, I don't think its a problem. At all.

2) I don't really care as long as it's cheap, lean, tastes good, and has reasonable quality control. Ideally, meat should be grown in vats so we can tailor it better.

3) Probably not. Issues of consent become important as you get into self-aware creatures, so it's more complicated than just yes/no.

4) Yes. I already have to go out of my way to eat meat because it's ridiculously expensive, and I've been known to go to obscure shops for specific things I can't get elsewhere.

Vegetarian:

1) Lab grown meat: yes, as long as it tasted good, wasn't too expensive, and was satisfying.

2) Natural to eat meat: yes, obviously. We can eat, digest, and draw nutrition from vast quantities of meat without issue, and eating meat regularly is something 90% of all humans can do without problems. To say that it's unnatural is just crazy.

3) It's my business what other people eat to the extent that it affects me: in other words, not very much. I usually suggest people improve their eating habits because it makes my world better. Sick people aren't as awesome to be around as healthy people.

4) My understanding is that it's the calorie density and iron intake that are the primary health issues with meat. People tend to eat a lot of really fatty meat in one setting, which is a pretty serious calorie load. The extra iron shaves a handful of months off overall lifespan via fairly well understood mechanisms.

Atheism can be legitimately viewed as a lack of belief

Not quite, that goes by the name of agnosticism. An atheist answers the question "Do gods exist?" by saying "No".

You've probably tested your belief in the lethality of long drops partially by falling out of trees as a child

The results of all these tests point out that falls are not lethal, of course :-P

I mostly agree with you, but we may disagree on the implausibility of exotic physics. Do you consider all explanations which require "exotic physics" to be less plausible than any explanation that does not? If you are willing to entertain "exotic physics", then are there many ideas involving exotic physics that you find more plausible than Catastrophe Engines?

In the domain of exotic physics, I find Catastrophe Engines to be relatively plausible since are already analogues of similar phenomena to Catastrophe Engines in known physics: for example, nuclear chain reactions. It is quite natural to think that a stronger method of energy production would result in even greater risks, and finally the inherent uncertainty of quantum physics implies that one can never eliminate the risk of any machine, regardless of engineering. Note that my explanation holds no matter how small the risk lambda actually is (though I implicitly assumed that the universe has infinite lifetime: for my explanation to work the expected life of the Catastrophe Engine has to be at most on the same order as the lifetime of the universe.)

It is also worth noting that there are many variants of the Catastrophe Engine hypothesis that have the same consequences but which you might find more or less plausible. Perhaps these Engines don't have "meltdown", but it is necessary that they experience some kind of interference from other nearby Engines that would prevent them from being built too closely to each other. You could suppose that the best Matrioshka Brains produce chaotic gravity waves that would interfere with other nearby Brains, for instance.

Personally, I find explanations that require implausible alien psychology to be less plausible than explanations that require unknown physics. I expect most higher civilizations to be indifferent about our existence unless we pose a substantial threat, and I expect a sizable fraction of higher civilizations to value expansion. Perhaps you have less confidence in our understanding of evolutionary biology than our understanding of physics, hence our disagreement.

For the sake of discussion, here is my subjective ranking of explanations by plausibility:

1. There are visible signs of other civilizations, we just haven't looked hard enough.
2. Most expansionist civilizations develop near light-speed colonization, hence making it very unlikely for us to exist in the interval between when their civilization is visible and our planet has already been colonized
3. We happen to be the first technologically advanced civilization in our visible universe
4. Most artifacts are invisible due to engineering considerations (e.g. the most efficient structures are made out of low-density nanofibers, or dark matter).
5. Colonization is much, much more difficult than we anticipated.
6. Defensively motivated "berserkers". Higher civs have delicate artifacts that could actually be harmed by much less advanced spacefaring species, hence new spacefaring species are routinely neutralized. It still needs to be explained why most of the universe hasn't been obviously manipulated, hence "Catastrophe Engines" or a similar hypothesis. Also, it needs to be explained why we still exist, since it would be presumably very cheap to neutralize our civilization.
7. Some "great filters" lie ahead of us: such as nuclear war. Extremely implausible because you would also have to explain why no species could manage to evolve with better cooperation skills.
8. "Galactic zoo" hypotheses and other explanations which require most higher civilizations to NOT be expansionist. Extremely implausible because many accidentally created strong AIs would be expansionist.

I ignore the hypothesis that "we are in a simulation" because it doesn't actually help explain why we would be the only species in the simulation.

EDIT: Modified the order

1) Postulates exotic physics and/or requires a change to the laws of physics to be possible. Low probability.

2) Postulates bad design and something that the builders would work to minimize. Low probability.

3) Postulates additional exotic physics that are likely different from 1) and don't really even make sense giving the vastness of space. Very low probability.

The search space of ideas is incredibly large, and we don't find solutions by picking ideas at random and testing them. Instead, we focus on the ideas that seem most reasonably plausible, and test those first. There are a LOT of ideas that are more reasonably plausible than catastrophe engines as described above.

Given what I know about physics, I actually find "we're the first intelligent technological life in the universe" to be more likely than catastrophe engines.

Depends on who you're marketing the site to. Programmers would be satisfied by descriptive links or even plain urls. Have you ever seen werc in action?

On the other hand of the scale, you have websites like this that appeals to.. I dunno, this design annoys me but I guess it works otherwise the site wouldn't be there for almost two years I know it.

Keep in mind that not all targets are the same. Two examples:

http://craigslist.org - designed above all else to be useful. The aesthetic that matters here is 'useful'.

http://alteraeon.com - small static pages designed to work well with blind/visually impaired screen readers.

Can someone explain me what's the point of this post? No offense intended; reading the first paragraph made my mind literally explode wondering what the hell I've just read.

I haven't read Permutation City (a comment mentioned it) and in fact I approached all LW material I've read with only my previous experience and reasoning abilities, and ALL topics such as this that feel so meta, out-of-this-world, and seemingly with no practical implications make no sense to me.

Am I missing something?

I consider it bad form to do such a massive rewrite, thereby obsoleting the entire previous comment stream.

Regarding your new post, I think you need to taboo the word 'measure' and rewrite all your posts without it. It would make things much more clear for the rest of us. When communicating with others, it is more important to be clear and precise than it is to be compact, and your use of 'measure' is neither clear nor precise to a good number of your audience.