I regularly bicker about hypotheticals on the Facebook group. I wish I could give a tidy answer here, but I can't put all hypotheticals in the same category. Some represent reality better than others. "Where will I post my ideas if this group closes?" is a perfectly normal and useful one.
The hypotheticals I question are ones that don't plausibly occur in reality and that are known primarily because they irritate the brain, or allow social signaling, or some other non-useful purpose.
"If a tree falls in the forest..." can be useful since it exposes how unclear language can be, but if people aren't aware of it, it mostly is just trolling.
Another is the "Sophie's Choice" hypothetical. Such as the Trolley problem, where you flip the switch to kill one person or leave it as killing three. This problem is famous not because it represents something people will run into in real life, but because it irritates the brain. The brain evolved in imperfect scenarios, and where apparent bad choices like this are best handled by looking for the many answers it hasn't yet considered. Without this instinct to reject the scenario, we may never have developed tools and many other things.
So, these types of scenarios trigger a natural instinct to avoid the problem, not to answer it, which makes perfect sense given the way our brains work. Without that realization, the question is just shared to bother other people or socially signal. This isn't useful behavior, and thus rejecting those hypotheticals I think is a fine response.
Hypotheticals are a powerful tool for testing intuitions. However, many people believe that it is problematic a hypothetical does not represent a realistic situation. On the contrary, it is only problematic if it is represented as being realistic when it is not realistic. Realism isn’t required if the aim is simply to show that there is *some* situation where the proposed principle breaks. We may still choose to utilise an imperfect principle, but when we know about the potential for breakage, we are much less likely to be tripped up if we find a situation where the principle is invalid.
It is instructive to look at physics. In physics, we model balls by perfect spherical objects. Nobody believes that a perfectly spherical object exists in real life. However, they provide a baseline theory from which further ideas can be explored. Bumps or ellipticity can be added later. Indeed, they probably *should* be added later. Unless a budding physicist can demonstrate their competence with the simple case, they probably should not be trusted with dealing with the much more complicated real world situation.
If you are doubting a hypothetical, then you haven’t accepted the hypothetical. You can doubt that a hypothetical will have any relevance from outside the hypothetical, but once you step inside the hypothetical you cannot doubt the hypothetical or you never stepped inside in the first place.
This topic has been discussed previously on LessWrong, but a single explanation won't prove compelling to everyone, so it is useful to have different explanations that explain the same topic in a different way.
TimS states similar thoughts in Please Don’t Fight the Hypothetical:
In, The Least Convenient World, Yvain recommends limiting your responses as follows:
You may also want to check out A note on hypotheticals by PhilGoetz