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VoiceOfRa comments on Hypothetical situations are not meant to exist - Less Wrong Discussion
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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.