If you think you can do better, please comment with suggestions.
Sure. My target will be the Smoking Lesion hypothetical. The hypothetical supposes:
There is some behavior B, which is pleasant.
There is some disease D, which is unpleasant.
There is some root cause C that tends to cause B & D.
B does not cause D and D does not cause B.
There are no observable intermediaries between C and B.
Question: should you engage in behavior B?
In the traditional Smoking Lesion, we pick B=smoking, D=cancer, and C=genetic lesion. This has four main downsides for me:
We must imagine that smoking does not cause cancer. This is quite a sizable change to the universe, and would have hard-to-predict consequences in terms of the prevalence and perception of smoking, for example. There’s quite a lot of mental effort required to keep this in mind while navigating the hypothetical.
We must imagine that smoking is pleasant, overall. Generally people say that smoking is an acquired taste and not initially pleasant, though there is some variation. There is also the unpleasantness of being addicted, of spending money, of non-cancer health effects, etc. So this is another sizable change to the universe.
Smoking is a somewhat taboo topic. Eg, smoking being pleasant, for anyone, can be taboo.
We must imagine that the genetic lesion directly causes smoking, with no observable intermediaries. So the lesion does not cause people to like the smell, or to be vulnerable to addiction, or to form habits faster, or to be convinced by evidential decision theory, or to have problems with weight that smoking helps with, or to have higher openness to experience, or anything like that.
If we imagine a “smoking” that is cheap, pleasant, non-addictive, not habit-forming, healthy, and doesn’t reduce weight, where everyone likes it the same amount, plus all the changes downstream of that, it’s unclear whether we should still call it “smoking”.
My proposed fix: replace the Smoking Lesion with the Dancing Lesion. Dancing is pleasant, is not taboo or controversial, and is not carcinogenic. It doesn’t completely fix the problem with observable intermediaries, but I suspect that is unfixable and a flaw in the hypothetical. Still, dancing is at least no worse than smoking in this respect. There are taboos in various cultures about certain types of dancing, but I’m not aware of any universal taboos and I think anyone can imagine a form of dance that is accepted in their culture.
Sure. My target will be the Smoking Lesion hypothetical. The hypothetical supposes:
There is some behavior B, which is pleasant.
There is some disease D, which is unpleasant.
There is some root cause C that tends to cause B & D.
B does not cause D and D does not cause B.
There are no observable intermediaries between C and B.
Question: should you engage in behavior B?
In the traditional Smoking Lesion, we pick B=smoking, D=cancer, and C=genetic lesion. This has four main downsides for me:
We must imagine that smoking does not cause cancer. This is quite a sizable change to the universe, and would have hard-to-predict consequences in terms of the prevalence and perception of smoking, for example. There’s quite a lot of mental effort required to keep this in mind while navigating the hypothetical.
We must imagine that smoking is pleasant, overall. Generally people say that smoking is an acquired taste and not initially pleasant, though there is some variation. There is also the unpleasantness of being addicted, of spending money, of non-cancer health effects, etc. So this is another sizable change to the universe.
Smoking is a somewhat taboo topic. Eg, smoking being pleasant, for anyone, can be taboo.
We must imagine that the genetic lesion directly causes smoking, with no observable intermediaries. So the lesion does not cause people to like the smell, or to be vulnerable to addiction, or to form habits faster, or to be convinced by evidential decision theory, or to have problems with weight that smoking helps with, or to have higher openness to experience, or anything like that.
If we imagine a “smoking” that is cheap, pleasant, non-addictive, not habit-forming, healthy, and doesn’t reduce weight, where everyone likes it the same amount, plus all the changes downstream of that, it’s unclear whether we should still call it “smoking”.
My proposed fix: replace the Smoking Lesion with the Dancing Lesion. Dancing is pleasant, is not taboo or controversial, and is not carcinogenic. It doesn’t completely fix the problem with observable intermediaries, but I suspect that is unfixable and a flaw in the hypothetical. Still, dancing is at least no worse than smoking in this respect. There are taboos in various cultures about certain types of dancing, but I’m not aware of any universal taboos and I think anyone can imagine a form of dance that is accepted in their culture.