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Gunnar_Zarncke 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.
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).