brazil84 comments on Please Don't Fight the Hypothetical - Less Wrong

19 Post author: TimS 20 April 2012 02:29PM

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Comment author: brazil84 12 May 2014 01:28:18PM 1 point [-]

Sadly, we don't live in a world where all hypotheticals are actually neutral excercises in deductive logic. In real debates it's quite common to see people constructing hypotheticals that implicitly assume their position on some issue is the correct one. If you accept one of these hypotheticals you've already lost the argument, regardless of the actual merits of the case.

I'm not sure exactly what you have in mind, but I think in that situation the best response to be explicit about what's going on.

e.g. "I would definitely choose Option A as I think that generally speaking and all things being equal, it's better not to torture puppy dogs. But so what? What does that have to do with my original point?"