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ChristianKl comments on Updating on hypotheticals - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (21)
Philosophy has a very bad track record at reliable production of knowledge. Reliable knowledge is much more often produced by interaction with the real world and empiric learning.
If you allow people to substantially affect your beliefs by hypotheticals that have nothing to do with reality I don't think you will update in the right direction.
Nassim Taleb wrote a lot on the subject of how the track record of people who try to hold beliefs that are detached from reality and only based on abstract reasoning is pretty poor.
A lot of thinks don't hold up in reality but you don't find the flaw by spending significant time thinking about the issue. That's why it's useful to not focus too much of your beliefs on abstract arguments but base as much as possible in interaction with the real world and be exposed to realworld feedback.
I never said that you had to substantially update. I think I might have addressed these points to some extent in the previous two posts, although there is probably more to be said on this. The fact that philosophy has a poor track record is a good point. I'm not going to address it here and now though. If I wanted to address this properly it'd need its own post and I generally don't like to invest the effort until I see an issue come up on multiple occasions.
This can be a bit motte-and-bailey. Without further definition of how much you think one should update it's hard to talk about it.
It isn't a Motte-and-bailey as I already acknowledged this limitation in the original post: "Obviously we will update to a much lesser degree than if we were confident in the logic, but we still have to update to some extent"
It would be useful to present an example and express your beliefs of how strongly you should update in numbers.
Just to underline here...philosophy has a bad track record because when it finds something concrete and useful, it gets split off into things like science and ethics, and very abstract things tend to be all that's left.
Hypotheticals are probably in the same class. Useful when they apply to reality, entertaining or stimulating sometimes even when they don't...and in some cases neither. The third category is the one I ignore.