This post claims, in two places, that Conjecture staff have been known to react defensively to negative feedback. When I first read the post, I was skeptical about this point i) being true, and ii) pointing to something substantial, if true. However, now that I've seen janus's response to this post over at LessWrong, I'm less skeptical. (Context: janus are former Conjecture staff.)

Just to clarify: is the core argument here roughly, "I'm suspicious of things that look like a Pascal's mugging"?

If this is your argument, then I agree with you (to an extent). But reading through your examples, I feel unsure whether the Pascal's mugging aspect is your crux, or if the weirdness of the conclusion is your crux. To test this concretely: if we were close to 100% confident that we do live in a universe where we could, e.g., produce quantum events that trigger branchings, would you want a lot of effort going into triggering such branchings? (For what it's worth, I would want this.)