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.
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.