I guess I’ve discussed my perspective on the issue of unrealistic hypotheticals here, although you’ve already commented on that post. Beyond that, Scott Alexanders The Least Convenient Possible World is a great post, but I suspect you’ve seen it too.
BTW, I created a wiki page for hypotheticals. I’ve summarised some arguments on why we should pay attention to unrealistic hypothetical, but it’d be useful to have some opposing arguments listed there as well.
Useful pointers. I do remember those conversations, of course, and I think the objections (and valid uses) remain—one can learn from unlikely or impossible hypotheticals, but it takes extra steps to specify why some parts of it would be applicable to real situations. I also remember the decoupling vs contextualizing discussion, and hadn’t connected it to this topic—I’m going to have to think more before I really understand whether Newcomb-like problems have clear enough paths to applicability that they can be decoupled by default or whether there’s a default context I can just apply to make sense of them.
I guess I’ve discussed my perspective on the issue of unrealistic hypotheticals here, although you’ve already commented on that post. Beyond that, Scott Alexanders The Least Convenient Possible World is a great post, but I suspect you’ve seen it too.
One additional thing which I can add is that this seems related to Decoupling vs. Contextualising norms.
BTW, I created a wiki page for hypotheticals. I’ve summarised some arguments on why we should pay attention to unrealistic hypothetical, but it’d be useful to have some opposing arguments listed there as well.
Useful pointers. I do remember those conversations, of course, and I think the objections (and valid uses) remain—one can learn from unlikely or impossible hypotheticals, but it takes extra steps to specify why some parts of it would be applicable to real situations. I also remember the decoupling vs contextualizing discussion, and hadn’t connected it to this topic—I’m going to have to think more before I really understand whether Newcomb-like problems have clear enough paths to applicability that they can be decoupled by default or whether there’s a default context I can just apply to make sense of them.