casebash comments on Updating on hypotheticals - Less Wrong

4 Post author: casebash 06 November 2015 11:49AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 06 November 2015 01:05:44PM 0 points [-]

I never said that you had to substantially update.

This can be a bit motte-and-bailey. Without further definition of how much you think one should update it's hard to talk about it.

Comment author: casebash 06 November 2015 01:12:42PM *  0 points [-]

It isn't a Motte-and-bailey as I already acknowledged this limitation in the original post: "Obviously we will update to a much lesser degree than if we were confident in the logic, but we still have to update to some extent"

Comment author: ChristianKl 06 November 2015 01:16:48PM 0 points [-]

It would be useful to present an example and express your beliefs of how strongly you should update in numbers.

Comment author: EGarrett 06 November 2015 05:56:58PM 1 point [-]

Just to underline here...philosophy has a bad track record because when it finds something concrete and useful, it gets split off into things like science and ethics, and very abstract things tend to be all that's left.

Hypotheticals are probably in the same class. Useful when they apply to reality, entertaining or stimulating sometimes even when they don't...and in some cases neither. The third category is the one I ignore.