In other words, you're still investigating the same things (possibly with different stopping criteria -- e.g. you'd be done if you disproved your hypothesis), but you have substantial evidence in favor of your hypothesis already. Am I understanding you correctly?
I'm not sure the blog post you're linking to is helpful, though. One could come up with your list of options without having done any prior investigation. In other words, unlike Einstein, it's entirely plausible to be at the stage where you're considering Option 2 without having evidence favoring Option 2 over the others. And even if you have 50% certainty in Option 2, that only implies 3-4 bits of evidence.
And I think the mistrust you see in the comments is due precisely to the absence of evidence from your post. Which is weakly evidence of absence. Granted, I don't think your post is intended to present all your evidence, but seeing some of it first would help frame your discussion.
Upvote from me! Yes, you are understanding me correctly.
One could indeed come up with my list of options without having done any prior investigation. But would one share it with others? My pointing at that particular post is meant to be a signal that I grok that it is not rational to share it with others until I believe that I have strong evidence that it is a strong hypothesis and have pretty much run out of experiments that I can conduct by myself that could possibly disprove the hypothesis.
Skepticism is desired as long as it doesn't interfere with th...
Premise: There exists a community whose top-most goal is to maximally and fairly fulfill the goals of all of its members. They are approximately as rational as the 50th percentile of this community. They politely invite you to join. You are in no imminent danger.
Do you:
Premise: The only rational answer given the current information is the last one.
What I’m attempting to eventually proveThe hypothesis that I'm investigating iswhether"Option 2 is the only long-term rational answer". (Yes, this directly challenges several major current premises so my arguments are going to have to be totally clear. I am fully aware of the rather extensive Metaethics sequence and the vast majority of what it links to and will not intentionally assume any contradictory premises without clear statement and argument.)It might be an interesting and useful exercise for the reader to stop and specify what information they would be looking next for before continuing. It would be nice if an ordered list could be developed in the comments.
Obvious Questions:
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