And I’m suggesting that the bias might be justified. Though it’s hard to talk about that without specific examples.
the point is to avoid complicating the discussion by forcing people to model the effect people finding out about a particular event would have on society and how they act.
What if this modeling explains 99% of moral choices, and when you remove it you’re left with nothing but noise? Or, what if this modeling is hard coded into my brain, and is literally impossible to turn off? I’m not trying to start an argument about whether this is true. I’m trying to show that even the simplest an most innocent looking unrealistic problems could be hiding faulty assumptions.
“What if this modeling explains 99% of moral choices, and when you remove it you’re left with nothing but noise?”—Even if it only applies to 1% of situations, it shouldn’t be rounded off to zero. After all, there’s a decent chance you’ll encounter at least one of these situations within your lifetime. But more importantly, this is addressed by the section on Practise Exercise Don’t Need to Be Real.
“Or, what if this modeling is hard coded into my brain, and is literally impossible to turn off?”—I view this similarly to showing someone a really complicated maths proof and them saying, “Given my brain, it’s literally impossible for me to understand a proof this complicated”. In this case you’ll just have to trust other people then. However if, like philosophy, experts disagree, well I suppose you’ll just have to figure out which experts to trust. But that said, I’m skeptical that this is the kind of thing hardcoded into anyone’s brain.
“I’m trying to show that even the simplest an most innocent looking unrealistic problems could be hiding faulty assumptions.”—The floating abstract model doesn’t contain these assumptions. You’ve made the assumption that the model is supposed to be directly applied, which is unwarranted.
The core issue, I think, is that for you “usefulness” is an extremely low bar. Indeed, it might be possible to take any question and show that the utility of having an answer to that question is > 0 (it would be quite hard to find an answer of negative utility, and it would be even harder to show that the utility is exactly 0). So, if you believe that all questions are useful, then there is no way I’ll convince you that some hypotheticals are useless.
And if you don’t believe this at all, then please give a few examples of useless questions, because, clearly, I don’t understand your metric of usefulness/importance.
By the way, why do you use “” quotes instead of the > blockquotes ? The latter are much more readable.
“So, if you believe that all questions are useful, then there is no way I’ll convince you that some hypotheticals are useless”—that’s purely a function of proving a negative being difficult in general. Why do you expect this to be easy?
1. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals is usually a valuable way to spend my time (or that I tend to underestimate the value of discussing them).
2. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals usually, eventually, produces some non-zero value.
(1) is what we disagree on, but (2) is what you seem to be proving. If I wanted to convince you that (2) is false, then I would really have to prove negatives. But it’s ok, I don’t actually disagree with (2), that claim is trivially true. If (2) is how you understand “usefulness”, then your post is correct, but also basically void of meaning.
(1) is the claim that some real, living, non-straw humans disagree with and it is not a claim that you defend well. And to disagree with (2) I don’t need to prove negatives, I only need to pick one hypothetical I find rather useless, and ask you to show me that it is really useful. And then, if you’re successful in convincing me, you will have proven that I do sometimes underestimate the value of such hypotheticals.
I tried to do this with the “no-one will ever know” hypotheticals, and I found your replies unconvincing. For example, you said:
Even if it only applies to 1% of situations, it shouldn’t be rounded off to zero.
When you say that something is not zero, you are talking about (2). If you wanted to talk about (1), you could try to explain why this 1% is either very important, or a reasonable starting point, but then I could change the initial assumption to 0.1% and so on (in fact I initially wanted to say that it applies to 0% situations, but hesitated). At some point you have to agree that my beliefs about brains are making the whole “no-one will ever know” class of hypotheticals near useless to me, which sort of contradicts your initial point.
And I’m suggesting that the bias might be justified. Though it’s hard to talk about that without specific examples.
What if this modeling explains 99% of moral choices, and when you remove it you’re left with nothing but noise? Or, what if this modeling is hard coded into my brain, and is literally impossible to turn off? I’m not trying to start an argument about whether this is true. I’m trying to show that even the simplest an most innocent looking unrealistic problems could be hiding faulty assumptions.
“What if this modeling explains 99% of moral choices, and when you remove it you’re left with nothing but noise?”—Even if it only applies to 1% of situations, it shouldn’t be rounded off to zero. After all, there’s a decent chance you’ll encounter at least one of these situations within your lifetime. But more importantly, this is addressed by the section on Practise Exercise Don’t Need to Be Real.
“Or, what if this modeling is hard coded into my brain, and is literally impossible to turn off?”—I view this similarly to showing someone a really complicated maths proof and them saying, “Given my brain, it’s literally impossible for me to understand a proof this complicated”. In this case you’ll just have to trust other people then. However if, like philosophy, experts disagree, well I suppose you’ll just have to figure out which experts to trust. But that said, I’m skeptical that this is the kind of thing hardcoded into anyone’s brain.
“I’m trying to show that even the simplest an most innocent looking unrealistic problems could be hiding faulty assumptions.”—The floating abstract model doesn’t contain these assumptions. You’ve made the assumption that the model is supposed to be directly applied, which is unwarranted.
The core issue, I think, is that for you “usefulness” is an extremely low bar. Indeed, it might be possible to take any question and show that the utility of having an answer to that question is > 0 (it would be quite hard to find an answer of negative utility, and it would be even harder to show that the utility is exactly 0). So, if you believe that all questions are useful, then there is no way I’ll convince you that some hypotheticals are useless.
And if you don’t believe this at all, then please give a few examples of useless questions, because, clearly, I don’t understand your metric of usefulness/importance.
By the way, why do you use “” quotes instead of the > blockquotes ? The latter are much more readable.
“So, if you believe that all questions are useful, then there is no way I’ll convince you that some hypotheticals are useless”—that’s purely a function of proving a negative being difficult in general. Why do you expect this to be easy?
There are two distinct claims:
1. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals is usually a valuable way to spend my time (or that I tend to underestimate the value of discussing them).
2. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals usually, eventually, produces some non-zero value.
(1) is what we disagree on, but (2) is what you seem to be proving. If I wanted to convince you that (2) is false, then I would really have to prove negatives. But it’s ok, I don’t actually disagree with (2), that claim is trivially true. If (2) is how you understand “usefulness”, then your post is correct, but also basically void of meaning.
(1) is the claim that some real, living, non-straw humans disagree with and it is not a claim that you defend well. And to disagree with (2) I don’t need to prove negatives, I only need to pick one hypothetical I find rather useless, and ask you to show me that it is really useful. And then, if you’re successful in convincing me, you will have proven that I do sometimes underestimate the value of such hypotheticals.
I tried to do this with the “no-one will ever know” hypotheticals, and I found your replies unconvincing. For example, you said:
When you say that something is not zero, you are talking about (2). If you wanted to talk about (1), you could try to explain why this 1% is either very important, or a reasonable starting point, but then I could change the initial assumption to 0.1% and so on (in fact I initially wanted to say that it applies to 0% situations, but hesitated). At some point you have to agree that my beliefs about brains are making the whole “no-one will ever know” class of hypotheticals near useless to me, which sort of contradicts your initial point.