“Imagine there’s a child drowning in a shallow pond. You’re wearing a swimsuit and could easily save them. Don’t believe me? Okay, let me make it more believable: imagine there’s also a cute puppy guarding the pond that you’d have to kill to reach the child. Would you do it?”
This seems very incoherent.
It starts with “Imagine” and then two sentences later asks “Don’t believe me?”
Believe what? Believe that I was asked to imagine something? I look back up a bit on the page, and I can have rather high credence that I was asked to imagine something.
Believe that I have imagined the scenario? I can have pretty high credence of imagining something that matches the description so that doesn’t fit either.
Believe that the imaginary scenario is real? Agreed, I definitely don’t believe that and there’s a lot of evidence that it’s false, but what relevance does it have? The text didn’t ask me to believe that.
Maybe believe that I could one day be in such a situation? Well, that’s definitely more believable but still very unlikely. I’m very much not in a habit of wearing swimsuits near ponds, though if it had been a swimming pool that would be more believable (while still being very unbelievable). So yes I don’t believe it.
Then the text goes on to posit a wildly more improbable scenario, prefaced with “let me make it more believable”. What? No, that just made it massively more unbelievable, so the writer of this story probably has terrible epistemics, or at best is authoring an unreliable narrator character that does. Pretty much any further detail would make it less believable by conjunction.
What’s worse, that particular conjunction is pretty ridiculous. I can still imagine it happening in some amazingly contrived scenario, but brings up so many other questions like “how” that make even suspension of disbelief for a fictional situation difficult. In what manner would I have to kill it to rescue the child? Is it basically a full-grown dog (but still cute) that would threaten my own life if I approach, and I happen to have a gun with my swimsuit? Maybe there’s a supernatural barrier that’s tied to its life? In what way is any of this more believable even for a very unreliable narrator?
That’s kind of the point… people reject premises all the time. And I don’t mean in the “this premise seems unrealistic” sense. I mean more in the “I refuse to participate in this thought experiment!” sense. Even when the point wasn’t to give a lesson about the shape of reality but to give a lesson about the shape of the reader’s mind and how they respond to the thought experiment.
People just hate inspecting their own mind with a passion. It’s also common for people not to trust you when you suggest a thought experiment if they can’t see where it’s going. It’s very easy to get an anger reaction this way (literally raised voice, tense muscles, raised heartbeat type of reaction).
This seems very incoherent.
It starts with “Imagine” and then two sentences later asks “Don’t believe me?”
Believe what? Believe that I was asked to imagine something? I look back up a bit on the page, and I can have rather high credence that I was asked to imagine something.
Believe that I have imagined the scenario? I can have pretty high credence of imagining something that matches the description so that doesn’t fit either.
Believe that the imaginary scenario is real? Agreed, I definitely don’t believe that and there’s a lot of evidence that it’s false, but what relevance does it have? The text didn’t ask me to believe that.
Maybe believe that I could one day be in such a situation? Well, that’s definitely more believable but still very unlikely. I’m very much not in a habit of wearing swimsuits near ponds, though if it had been a swimming pool that would be more believable (while still being very unbelievable). So yes I don’t believe it.
Then the text goes on to posit a wildly more improbable scenario, prefaced with “let me make it more believable”. What? No, that just made it massively more unbelievable, so the writer of this story probably has terrible epistemics, or at best is authoring an unreliable narrator character that does. Pretty much any further detail would make it less believable by conjunction.
What’s worse, that particular conjunction is pretty ridiculous. I can still imagine it happening in some amazingly contrived scenario, but brings up so many other questions like “how” that make even suspension of disbelief for a fictional situation difficult. In what manner would I have to kill it to rescue the child? Is it basically a full-grown dog (but still cute) that would threaten my own life if I approach, and I happen to have a gun with my swimsuit? Maybe there’s a supernatural barrier that’s tied to its life? In what way is any of this more believable even for a very unreliable narrator?
That’s kind of the point… people reject premises all the time. And I don’t mean in the “this premise seems unrealistic” sense. I mean more in the “I refuse to participate in this thought experiment!” sense. Even when the point wasn’t to give a lesson about the shape of reality but to give a lesson about the shape of the reader’s mind and how they respond to the thought experiment.
People just hate inspecting their own mind with a passion. It’s also common for people not to trust you when you suggest a thought experiment if they can’t see where it’s going. It’s very easy to get an anger reaction this way (literally raised voice, tense muscles, raised heartbeat type of reaction).