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Dagon comments on Hypothetical situations are not meant to exist - Less Wrong Discussion
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I actually agree that fighting the hypothetical is annoying, and that it's easy (both in presenting and in reacting to a hypothetical) to get into a bad discussion state. Here are two reasons it can be difficult to usefully respond to hypotheticals.
1) It's perfectly reasonable to claim that a hypothetical is so divorced from reality, or so incompletely specified that it's not worth the effort to analyze. A physics analogy would be "imagine you could go back in time. how much energy would it take to get to 1983?". Just not complete or useful enough to discuss.
Many moral-intuition hypotheticals, IMO, are of this form: imagine some surface features of a situation. Now, based on the deep structure behind those features (which would take days or years to identify), how would you react?
2) Many hypotheticals are trotted out in a way that feels like (or is) a trap. It's not that you're exploring the world with your conversational partner, it's that you're trying to win an argument by getting them to admit to a contradiction. That's no fun if your partner/adversary isn't into it.
The minimum energy required is ~1,000*(Your mass in kilograms + the mass in kilograms of everything coming with you) petajoules, assuming you want to get to 1983 in about three months of subjective time, with a gross of assumptions about the way time works. A minimum of 200 joules per kilogram will get you a subjective arrival time of 1.2 million years. [ETA: Forgot about deceleration. 400 joules for the 1.2 million year mark.]
Fully agree. The assumption seems to be that ones intuition will deal with that but I don't trust my intuition to come up with the best decision (one that I'd prefer to live with in the long run).
1) If a hypothetical is unspecified, and you ask for it to be clarified, then that isn't fighting the hypothetical.
Re: Too divorced from reality. "But fighting the hypothetical by challenging the premises of the scenario is exactly the same as saying, "I don't find this topic interesting for whatever reason, and wish to talk about something I am interested in."" - TimS
2) People are often too ready to consider things as a trap. Some people will claim that any convincing or hard to argue against statement is a "trap"
There are a lot of other things it can mean. For example, "I reject the agenda behind the hypothetical." "I reject the attempt to induce me to give you a soundbite that you are going to broadcast out of context." "The minute part of possibility space that you are focussing on does not merit so much as a millisecond of anyone's attention." "You are stuffing your desired conclusion into the hypotheses."
"The minute part of possibility space that you are focussing on does not merit so much as a millisecond of anyone's attention." - which is exactly the same as: "I don't find this topic interesting for whatever reason, and wish to talk about something I am interested in."
"I reject the attempt to induce me to give you a soundbite that you are going to broadcast out of context" - that can definitely be the case. But this isn't really an issue specific to hypotheticals, just non-good faith discussions in general.
"does not merit so much as a millisecond of anyone's attention" is a quite different claim from "I don't find this topic interesting".
Unfortunately, people will rarely actually do that. In particular, I've yet to see anyone else ask, much less answer, what appears to be highly relevant information in the classic train-switch dilemma: what are these people doing on the track?
The problem with hypotheticals is that they're fictional evidence that you're asking people to generalize from.
The version of the dilemma I'm familiar with specifies that all six people had been kidnapped by a mentally ill philosopher and tied onto the tracks against their will.
"In particular, I've yet to see anyone else ask, much less answer, what appears to be highly relevant information in the classic train-switch dilemma: what are these people doing on the track?" - the way to get around it is to ask the questioner if they have any objections to you imagining a specific scenario. Such as, you might pretend that the people were put there by an evil villain or that they were stupidly walking along it. If someone says that it "doesn't matter", then you should consider yourself free to imagine whatever situation you want.
"The problem with hypotheticals is that they're fictional evidence that you're asking people to generalize from." - I think you're really misunderstanding that article. There's a huge difference between trying to argue that robots will take over the world because it happened in Terminator and considering the hypothetical situation of human-level AI.
I'm perfectly aware of how to ask a question. My point is that most people confronted with a hypothetical don't ask any clarifying questions, and base their answers on whatever associations were in the question.
I think that at times, 'This is a very uninteresting question' is the appropriate response. Just, lead with that and explain why next, rather than just explaining why.