Thanks for this. I wish you’d framed it more as “what can thought experiments show and what they can’t”. There are two HUGE advantages that thought experiments have over real life:
Thought experiments are cheap and scalable. Nobody actually drowns or gets run over by a trolley, even if millions of people consider the thought experiment. Thought experiments aren’t even bound by physical feasibility. The downside is that they don’t prove anything, in the sense of demonstrating an actual outcome. They remain in the domain of thought.
Thought experiments are automatically abstract/general. This is a strength AND a weakness—in truth, most interesting questions are a tension between competing values/desiderata, and the details matter a lot in determining exactly where the line is for this instance. Thought experiments allow and require us to fill in unspecified details, and for the best ones, ask which details are important in evaluation.
Thought experiments are VERY GOOD at showing conflicts between intuitions. They’re just OK, but they’re all we have, at extending intuitions into nonexistent situations so they can be examined and discussed.
Thought experiments are NOT EVIDENCE of anything in the real world, but they ARE EVIDENCE of consistency and details of one’s model of the world.
I broadly agree. Maybe my title is a bit clickbaity.
My claim is that, on the margin, hypothetical dilemmas are overrated (especially in ethics, decision theory, and lesswrong), and that most discussions about these hypothetical dilemmas should be replaced by discussions about real-life dilemmas.
e.g. rather than discussing the “child in a pond” problem, people should discuss the “should I donate £1000 to AMF?” problem. The benefit of focusing on the second problem is that you can actually execute your decision.
The second problem is also cheap and scalable!
Other examples: people waste time on “would I hypothetically hide a hypothetical Jew from hypothetical Nazis in my hypothetical attic?” rather than on “should I actually risk my life to actually save an actual person from actual persecution?”
Thanks for this. I wish you’d framed it more as “what can thought experiments show and what they can’t”. There are two HUGE advantages that thought experiments have over real life:
Thought experiments are cheap and scalable. Nobody actually drowns or gets run over by a trolley, even if millions of people consider the thought experiment. Thought experiments aren’t even bound by physical feasibility. The downside is that they don’t prove anything, in the sense of demonstrating an actual outcome. They remain in the domain of thought.
Thought experiments are automatically abstract/general. This is a strength AND a weakness—in truth, most interesting questions are a tension between competing values/desiderata, and the details matter a lot in determining exactly where the line is for this instance. Thought experiments allow and require us to fill in unspecified details, and for the best ones, ask which details are important in evaluation.
Thought experiments are VERY GOOD at showing conflicts between intuitions. They’re just OK, but they’re all we have, at extending intuitions into nonexistent situations so they can be examined and discussed.
Thought experiments are NOT EVIDENCE of anything in the real world, but they ARE EVIDENCE of consistency and details of one’s model of the world.
I broadly agree. Maybe my title is a bit clickbaity.
My claim is that, on the margin, hypothetical dilemmas are overrated (especially in ethics, decision theory, and lesswrong), and that most discussions about these hypothetical dilemmas should be replaced by discussions about real-life dilemmas.
e.g. rather than discussing the “child in a pond” problem, people should discuss the “should I donate £1000 to AMF?” problem. The benefit of focusing on the second problem is that you can actually execute your decision.
The second problem is also cheap and scalable!
Other examples: people waste time on “would I hypothetically hide a hypothetical Jew from hypothetical Nazis in my hypothetical attic?” rather than on “should I actually risk my life to actually save an actual person from actual persecution?”