I’m not sure why you think insufficient results imply insufficient effort, nor why you think this group is likely to do much better, especially without examples or criteria for a good thought experiment.
From my perspective, a whole lot of human effort has gone into philosophical thought experiments, and that these are the best we’ve found indicates that they’re probably close to the best that are findable by “trying harder”. this doesn’t make them GOOD; it may just indicate that good ones are impossible, or unfindable by current mechanisms.
Different search mechanisms might come up with something, or might just provide evidence that there aren’t any great ones.
I also disagree that these are all that bad. IMO, the purpose of such experiments are to simplify the scenario to provide contrast between competing desiderata, in order to make them explicit. The trolley problem does show the contrast between the intuition that non-action is preferable to harmful-action and the intuition that fewer deaths is better than more. The fact that it’s not a real-world choice is not that harmful in this purpose, and introducing all the complexities of reality really obscures the main distinction.
I’m not sure why you think insufficient results imply insufficient effort, nor why you think this group is likely to do much better, especially without examples or criteria for a good thought experiment.
From my perspective, a whole lot of human effort has gone into philosophical thought experiments, and that these are the best we’ve found indicates that they’re probably close to the best that are findable by “trying harder”. this doesn’t make them GOOD; it may just indicate that good ones are impossible, or unfindable by current mechanisms.
Different search mechanisms might come up with something, or might just provide evidence that there aren’t any great ones.
I also disagree that these are all that bad. IMO, the purpose of such experiments are to simplify the scenario to provide contrast between competing desiderata, in order to make them explicit. The trolley problem does show the contrast between the intuition that non-action is preferable to harmful-action and the intuition that fewer deaths is better than more. The fact that it’s not a real-world choice is not that harmful in this purpose, and introducing all the complexities of reality really obscures the main distinction.