I think your “attentional resources” are just being Counterfactually Mugged here, so if you’re okay with that, you ought to be okay with some attention being diverted away from “real” ideas, if you’re reasonably confident in your construction of the counterfactual “Bob’s idea might HAVE BEEN good”.
This way of looking at it also says that tenure is a bad metaphor: your confidence in the counterfactual being true can change over time.
(If you then insist that this confidence in your counterfactual is also something that affects Bob, which it kinda does, then I’m afraid we’re encountering an instance of unfair problem class in the wild and I don’t know what to do)
As an aside, this makes me think: What happens when all consumers in the market are willing to get counterfactually mugged? Where I’m not able to return my defected phone because prediction markets said it would have worked? I suppose this is not very different from the concept of force majeure, only systematized.
I think your “attentional resources” are just being Counterfactually Mugged here, so if you’re okay with that, you ought to be okay with some attention being diverted away from “real” ideas, if you’re reasonably confident in your construction of the counterfactual “Bob’s idea might HAVE BEEN good”.
This way of looking at it also says that tenure is a bad metaphor: your confidence in the counterfactual being true can change over time.
(If you then insist that this confidence in your counterfactual is also something that affects Bob, which it kinda does, then I’m afraid we’re encountering an instance of unfair problem class in the wild and I don’t know what to do)
As an aside, this makes me think: What happens when all consumers in the market are willing to get counterfactually mugged? Where I’m not able to return my defected phone because prediction markets said it would have worked? I suppose this is not very different from the concept of force majeure, only systematized.