“So, if you believe that all questions are useful, then there is no way I’ll convince you that some hypotheticals are useless”—that’s purely a function of proving a negative being difficult in general. Why do you expect this to be easy?
1. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals is usually a valuable way to spend my time (or that I tend to underestimate the value of discussing them).
2. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals usually, eventually, produces some non-zero value.
(1) is what we disagree on, but (2) is what you seem to be proving. If I wanted to convince you that (2) is false, then I would really have to prove negatives. But it’s ok, I don’t actually disagree with (2), that claim is trivially true. If (2) is how you understand “usefulness”, then your post is correct, but also basically void of meaning.
(1) is the claim that some real, living, non-straw humans disagree with and it is not a claim that you defend well. And to disagree with (2) I don’t need to prove negatives, I only need to pick one hypothetical I find rather useless, and ask you to show me that it is really useful. And then, if you’re successful in convincing me, you will have proven that I do sometimes underestimate the value of such hypotheticals.
I tried to do this with the “no-one will ever know” hypotheticals, and I found your replies unconvincing. For example, you said:
Even if it only applies to 1% of situations, it shouldn’t be rounded off to zero.
When you say that something is not zero, you are talking about (2). If you wanted to talk about (1), you could try to explain why this 1% is either very important, or a reasonable starting point, but then I could change the initial assumption to 0.1% and so on (in fact I initially wanted to say that it applies to 0% situations, but hesitated). At some point you have to agree that my beliefs about brains are making the whole “no-one will ever know” class of hypotheticals near useless to me, which sort of contradicts your initial point.
“So, if you believe that all questions are useful, then there is no way I’ll convince you that some hypotheticals are useless”—that’s purely a function of proving a negative being difficult in general. Why do you expect this to be easy?
There are two distinct claims:
1. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals is usually a valuable way to spend my time (or that I tend to underestimate the value of discussing them).
2. That discussing unrealistic hypotheticals usually, eventually, produces some non-zero value.
(1) is what we disagree on, but (2) is what you seem to be proving. If I wanted to convince you that (2) is false, then I would really have to prove negatives. But it’s ok, I don’t actually disagree with (2), that claim is trivially true. If (2) is how you understand “usefulness”, then your post is correct, but also basically void of meaning.
(1) is the claim that some real, living, non-straw humans disagree with and it is not a claim that you defend well. And to disagree with (2) I don’t need to prove negatives, I only need to pick one hypothetical I find rather useless, and ask you to show me that it is really useful. And then, if you’re successful in convincing me, you will have proven that I do sometimes underestimate the value of such hypotheticals.
I tried to do this with the “no-one will ever know” hypotheticals, and I found your replies unconvincing. For example, you said:
When you say that something is not zero, you are talking about (2). If you wanted to talk about (1), you could try to explain why this 1% is either very important, or a reasonable starting point, but then I could change the initial assumption to 0.1% and so on (in fact I initially wanted to say that it applies to 0% situations, but hesitated). At some point you have to agree that my beliefs about brains are making the whole “no-one will ever know” class of hypotheticals near useless to me, which sort of contradicts your initial point.