"she felt like morality "loved" her."

Maybe you can explain to her that internal constructs can feel like external entities.

also from reading her blog post I got the impression rationality was a limit on her ability to choose her beliefs in this area rather than her means for doing so

"I couldn’t pick consistency over my construction project as long as I didn’t believe it was true."

Also this, "until I discovered that their study of virtue ethics has led them to take a tumble into the Tiber" makes it sound like she is a "pragmatist" or whatever the term is or she thinks finding the true morality has to be satisfying for some reason.

Also I can't believe this doesn't bother people. If you are happy to worship someone who sends people to hell your morality sucks. That your morality isn't currently (directly) harming anyone doesn't mean it's not dangerous.

I think I have a couple of suggestions:

1. Find a current social/scientific norm that maps almost perfectly to Archimedes' time that you disagree with (e.g. the need for a strong, expansionist military; use of torture; increase in state power over citizens; existence of a political class etc.) and use the same arguments against it now, including outcomes and dangers, and they should map to decent arguments then.

2. Find a socially wronged group and use arguments for their emancipation (women, non-whites, gays, children etc. depending on your era) and whichever hated/discriminated against group they map to in Archimedes' time will almost definitely be helped by your emancipation arguments.

3. Say that hatred/fear based on religion is wrong, but that religion itself is wrong and the acquiescence to authority is also problematic.

4. Describe the problems of current economic bubbles, their causes and possible solutions to avoid them. This will hopefully help with the basic economy of ancient Greece.

5. Argue for non-objective morality. And moral error theory. And a lack of libertarian free will. And against fate (but for a QM-accepting variant of determinism).

Basically, as long as your argument is against the common knowledge/understanding of your time you have a chance of getting across a decent version of it, or the principle at least, especially if the common knowledge has a (close) corollary in Archimedes' time. (HT. unequally-yoked).

Shouldn't that answer then result in a "Invalid Question" to the original "Would you be a proper scientific skeptic if you were born in 500 CE?" question?

I mean, what you are saying here is that it isn't possible for you to have been born in 500 C.E., that you are a product of your genetics and environment and cannot be separated from those conditions that resulted in you. So the answer isn't "Yes" it is "That isn't a valid question."

I'm not saying I agree, especially since I think the initial question can be rephrased as "Given the population of humans born in 500 C.E. and the historical realities of the era, do you believe that any person born in this era could have been a proper scientific skeptic and given that, do you believe that you would have developed into one had your initial conditions been otherwise identical, or at least highly similar?" Making it personal (Would you be...) is just a way of conferring the weight of the statement, as it is assumed that the readers of LW all have brains capable of modelling hypothetical scenarios, even if those scenarios don't (or can't even in principle) match reality.

The question isn't asking if it is ACTUALLY possible for you to have been born in 500 CE, it is asking you to model the reality of someone in the first person as born in 500 CE and, taking into account what you know of the era, ask if you really think that someone with otherwise equivalent initial starting conditions would have grown into a proper scientific skeptic.

It's also shorter to just bring in the personal hypothetical, which helps.

I find it's easier to think clearly about this stuff if, when calculating the costs on both sides, I try to forget that I have a preferred answer.

The cost of someone shouting "fire!" in a theatre is what it is; I'm inclined to agree with you that it's not very high, though I think you're trying to make it sound lower than it is. The cost of preventing someone from shouting "fire!" in a theatre is what it is as well. Looking at just the first-order costs I conclude that the costs of preventing it are in general lower than the costs of it happening.

The second-order costs are less clear to me and can easily swamp the first-order costs, though. Mostly it becomes a question of whether there's a reliable Schelling point near shouting "fire!" that I expect to prevent that from becoming grounds for supporting higher-cost speech suppression. I'm less certain about that; and I expect it depends a lot on the specific community, so I can easily see where the "shouting fire" legal principle leads to a lot of expensive bad law, and that on balance we'd therefore do better discarding the principle.

Or perhaps not.
If I were actually interested in activism on this issue, I would start by refining my estimates.

As for intent, I'd say it's at least theoretically relevant. For example, I consider the cost of having prevented all-and-only people who wish to shout "fire!" in a theatre for malicious reasons from doing so to be significantly lower than the costs of having prevented everyone from doing so regardless of their intent. That said, the costs of implementing such a policy given current technology are onerous, so I probably oppose (given current technology) having such a law, although various cheap approximations of it might be OK.

So who was that person who started learning the skills that you now have?

Do you really think you're so smart that you would have been a proper scientific skeptic even if you'd been born in 500 C.E.?

Yes. "But your genes would be different." Then it wouldn't be me. "Okay, same genes, but no scientific education." Then it wouldn't be me.

As much as such a thing as 'me' exists then it comes with all the knowledge and skills I have gained either through genetics, training or learning. Otherwise it isn't 'me'.

I happen to think there is another notion here - intent. The intent of the "fire!" yeller is somewhat irrelevant since the actual danger is, or should be, minimal.

The is a core part of the disagreement. The cost of preventing risk of injury from a false yell of fire is prohibitive for the owner of the theater. So it is reasonable to shift some of the cost of prevention to the person who knows there is no fire but wants to yell fire, in part because the cost of not falsely yelling fire is so low. Further, it is reasonable to expect the potential false-yeller to know that the yell will be believed, cause panic and therefore cause injury.

The Koran burner receives more protection because there wasn't a knowing falsehood in that case. The relevant mental state is not intent to harm, but knowledge of the statement's falsity.

One is criminal and the other is civil? One is a dispute between two (equal under the law) individuals in front of a (supposedly) impartial judge and the other is the state versus an individual? Quite a lot of difference really.

This distinction breaks down very quickly. Consider Hustler v. Falwell, which limited the scope of civil remedies because enforcement of those remedies violated freedom of speech.

So your idea is to have them stay in there indefinitely as someone might get hurt on the way out?

That's not at all what I said.

If you can't evacuate a theatre without a reasonable expectation that no-one will be harmed you shouldn't be running a theatre and anyone who is harmed should sue you (or fire marshals, local council, regulators or whoever should shut you down).

Basically what TheOtherDave (hmm, convenient, as I happen to be a Dave as well...) said. A bunch of frightened people moving about all at once are going to present more risk than a bunch of calm people trickling in and out; the question is what we can do to lower that risk. Any security measure is about tradeoffs, and when it costs X to lower the risk by Y of harm Z, and X > Y * Z * chance of an incident, then implementing the measure is bad policy. This calculus is embodied in the decisions made by the fire marshals and the local councils and regulators and whatnot as they put together the local fire code, run inspections, etc, whose goal is not to reduce the risk to zero (or even "absolutely as low as we can go at any cost").

Any theatre offering access to the public should be able to evacuate all patrons safely in the event of a real fire, thus someone falsely yelling "fire!" simply inconveniences people and should be banned by the owner

A theater than can protect its patrons against a real fire doesn't necessarily equal a theater that can protect its patrons against a false fire.

Nor do I find it more reasonable to ban businesses that are incapable of protecting all patrons against the repercussions of all types of lying. I find it far more reasonable, and much of a "Schelling point" to ban spreading knowingly false information.

e.g. someone being slandered could sue rather than have the slanderer arrested

That's effectively a matter of degree -- you're just saying that the punishment should be a fine instead of a prison sentence. It's not really a difference in kind.