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TimS comments on Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
It depends a bit on how well the discussion is going - if it isn't trying to reach true beliefs then that is your problem, not the appropriateness of the hypothetical.
But if the discussion is going well, then knee-jerk reactions to the hypothetical aren't helpful. The fact that a reflex answer usually works is no evidence that it handles edge cases well. And if it doesn't handle edge cases well, then it might not be a very coherent position after all.
Yeah, that's what I often find - otherwise smart people using an edge case to argue unreasonable but "clever" contrarian things about ordinary behavior.
"I found an inconsistency, therefore your behavior comes from social signalling" is bad thinking, even when a smart and accomplished person does it.
So if someone posts a hypothetical, my first meta-question is whether they go into it assuming that they should be curious, rather than contemptuous, about inconsistent responses. "Frustrated" I respect, and "confused" I respect, but "contemptuous"...
If you're comfortable being contemptuous about ordinary human behavior, you have to prove a whole heck of a lot to me about your practical success in life before I play along with your theoretical construct.
Ordinary human behavior can be your opponent, but you can't take it lightly - it's what allowed you to exist in the first place.
I think you will find this post is a helpful way of approaching the issue.
Beyond that, I think it is a reasonable interpretive canon of rationality that inconsistency is bad.