4 ms·

Not spending time considering hypotheticals you don't imagine to be true at all is a pretty rational thing to do.

pryce 8y ago
That seems intuitive but is surprisingly misguided; in fact, it depends on your purpose. Consider planned destructive testing in engineering, where perhaps one component is built purposefully weakened and then the whole system stressed in order to ascertain where and how the other components fail in response. This can lead to better understanding and to superior alternative designs in future. In a related way, we can imagine destructive testing on facets of our institutions and societies, and try to ascertain how our systems may then fail in turn. One example is when designing constitutional separation of powers, we might find it implausible to imagine a president intentionally undermining the Justice Department and his own intelligence agencies, but yet still design the constitutional separation of powers in such a way that the system retains some amount of robustness or integrity should that ever eventuate. We might choose to design our medical quarantine protocols in such a way that they don't overly rely on protecting against known agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, amoebae etc) but have some robustness against not yet encountered classes of threat, eg quarantine protocols that were concieved before the discovery of prion diseases.
- mseebach 8y ago
  When we do destructive testing in engineering, it's because we know for a fact that stuff fails for any or no reason, and while it might be rare, it happens all the time at scale. When the framers of the constitution designed strong separation of powers, they absolutely explicitly expected presidents to try to become kings, and so designed very strong safeguards against that happening. The problem with your Facebook hypothetical is the absence of a mechanism by which the bad situation happens. How do we get to a point where Facebook to any practical degree has the power to prevent someone from dating at all? There has always been smaller and larger groups of misfits and outcasts, and they have generally been capable of connecting with each other beyond the majority hegemony (caveats here of course for repressive government power, but that's out of scope for this hypothetical, and belongs in constitution-related hypotheticals). But let's then consider the hypothesis: Even if they do get to a significant position in dating, there are plenty of reason to believe they wouldn't use that power to prevent "anti-Facebookers" to date: privately owned publishers and printers happily print and sell the communist manifesto. You can sell your anti-Amazon book on Amazon, and publish it to Kindle. You can search for all the reasons Google is the worst company ever on Google. You can put "I hate Tinder" in your Tinder profile. And you can form a group about why Facebook is awful on Facebook, organise a "down with Facebook" rally using Facebook events and sell "Facebook sucks" stickers on Facebook marketplace. The logic of private markets very simply shows that it's plainly in a company's interest not to discriminate against people for the transgression of merely not liking the company.

That seems intuitive but is surprisingly misguided; in fact, it depends on your purpose. Consider planned destructive testing in engineering, where perhaps one component is built purposefully weakened and then the whole system stressed in order to ascertain where and how the other components fail in response. This can lead to better understanding and to superior alternative designs in future. In a related way, we can imagine destructive testing on facets of our institutions and societies, and try to ascertain how our systems may then fail in turn. One example is when designing constitutional separation of powers, we might find it implausible to imagine a president intentionally undermining the Justice Department and his own intelligence agencies, but yet still design the constitutional separation of powers in such a way that the system retains some amount of robustness or integrity should that ever eventuate. We might choose to design our medical quarantine protocols in such a way that they don't overly rely on protecting against known agents (viruses, bacteria, fungi, parasites, amoebae etc) but have some robustness against not yet encountered classes of threat, eg quarantine protocols that were concieved before the discovery of prion diseases.

mseebach 8y ago
When we do destructive testing in engineering, it's because we know for a fact that stuff fails for any or no reason, and while it might be rare, it happens all the time at scale. When the framers of the constitution designed strong separation of powers, they absolutely explicitly expected presidents to try to become kings, and so designed very strong safeguards against that happening. The problem with your Facebook hypothetical is the absence of a mechanism by which the bad situation happens. How do we get to a point where Facebook to any practical degree has the power to prevent someone from dating at all? There has always been smaller and larger groups of misfits and outcasts, and they have generally been capable of connecting with each other beyond the majority hegemony (caveats here of course for repressive government power, but that's out of scope for this hypothetical, and belongs in constitution-related hypotheticals). But let's then consider the hypothesis: Even if they do get to a significant position in dating, there are plenty of reason to believe they wouldn't use that power to prevent "anti-Facebookers" to date: privately owned publishers and printers happily print and sell the communist manifesto. You can sell your anti-Amazon book on Amazon, and publish it to Kindle. You can search for all the reasons Google is the worst company ever on Google. You can put "I hate Tinder" in your Tinder profile. And you can form a group about why Facebook is awful on Facebook, organise a "down with Facebook" rally using Facebook events and sell "Facebook sucks" stickers on Facebook marketplace. The logic of private markets very simply shows that it's plainly in a company's interest not to discriminate against people for the transgression of merely not liking the company.