/pt/ – Petrarchan

>>9487 Thank god there are no natural corollaries you engage with in your everyday life

>>9487 humor me for this one, anyway? 💙

(double posting, sue me) >>9487 What principle would that be? This is not game theory because it's not a question about rational actors - it's a question being posed to living human beings, who are only partially rational. Thought experiments like this can help you better understand the values and decision making process of other people, and for that I think they have some value. You can use game theory to make an argument for why one option is better than the other - or you could approach it from a purely emotional perspective, or more likely use some combination of the two. Game theory is a field of study meant to model decision making between rational actors. It does not require you to accept real life people as perfectly rational actors, and I would reckon that the majority of people who study game theory acknowledge that is not the case. I think part of the reason game theory gets such a bad rap is because it reveals the flaws of perfect rationality - reason absent of human emotion can be a monstrous thing. That is no more of a reason to discard game theory as the complexity of human psychology is a reason to discard psychiatry as a field of study.

>>9491 No, not even this time, because the Red-Blue allegory in the Tweet is a very lame and transparent attempt to map moral hypotheticals onto American domestic election politics, and I reject the two-party system as one of the core causes of the American tragedy.

>>9517 if everyone picks blue, nobody dies. so why red?

>>9518 Why makes you think your choice is less logical? You've constructed a model for how other people will be making your choices and analyzed the outcomes of the choices you have. You're employing game theory to make your decision while deriding others for doing the same. The difference between you and those "insufferable rationalists" is not having or lacking logic, but a different model for the other choice-makers and a different consideration of the outcomes. For instance, does your answer change if you reckon only 30% of the population would pick blue? Is the parent of 3 insufferable because they realize they aren't gambling their own life, but the emotional well-being of their spouse and the provider to their children when voting blue? Pat yourself on the back for valuing the greater good over your own life if you like, but don't delude yourself into thinking you're celebrating being 'less logical'.

>>9518 One more for the road - how I wish you could edit my posts - notice how you've placed yourself at the center of all of these outcomes. If it fails, YOU aren't stuck living with insufferable people. If it succeeds, YOU don't feel guilty for giving up on others. For blue being the option of empathetic people, it sure seems your decision to choose it is motivated mostly by self-interest.

>>9523 The principle being that these hypothetical questions are so far removed from the real world as to be meaningless. No such vote described in the Tweet will ever happen, so why debate about it? I will never happen to be at a trolley stop able to pull the lever between five babies and one doctor, so why debate it? No one has ever given me an answer to this, they all reply to these questions with some sort of personal insult to my intelligence or ability to ponder hypotheticals. This is a genre of thought that has been created nearly whole cloth by popular media: it's not intrinsic to the philosophical tradition, it's something you saw in a movie like Hunger Games and now we all have to waste our time in these ridiculous middle school-level "brain teasers". It's a poll, not philosophical inquiry. Even more preposterous is the idea that you can conduct any sort of research or learning about the human condition based on the results of the poll. It is bullshit to create an unreasonable, outlandish scenario and then try to extract data out of it to support real-life conclusions. It's the ultimate in lazy thinking to rest entire philosophical conclusions (or worse, conclusions about one's character) on a singular choice in a nonsense scenario. Again, it's not a philosophical question because there is no theory involved, there are no deeper conclusions to be drawn by one's answer than how much do they claim to value empathy, but only in the specific backdrop of American electoral politics. It should be discounted on those grounds alone immediately without even starting the usual debate about thought experiments. Americans are helplessly bound to this two-choice dynamic. You know what, I will actually contradict myself and mention a situation in which this literally DID happen to me: I received a phone call by a polling company asking if I would vote Republican or Democrat in the (then) upcoming election. I said, neither. I do not support either of the two main parties. The lady on the other end of the line said, "Yeah, but if you had to pick." And I replied, "I'm not picking either. There are other parties on the ballot." And she said, "Yeah, but like, gun to your head. If you had to pick either Republican or Democrat and didn't have any other choice, who would you pick?" So I hung up. There's your answer to the Tweet.

>>9525 Imagine we wanted to prove that some chemical causes cancer. To do so we might take a bunch of rats and give them incredibly high doses of that chemical. At this point you might say "This experiment is so far removed from the real world as to be meaningless. I would never consume such a high dosage, and I am not a rat." And in a narrow sense you would be correct. We cannot perform empirical research on questions of ethics and political philosophy, so most of the discussion around the subtly differences between metaethical frameworks is done using "edge cases" -- extreme examples which may or may not be real/possible which attempt to stretch a principle to its breaking point (e.g. the categorical imperative to not commit murder in the trolley problems). This is the utility of thought experiments. It doesn't matter if you answer them or not.

>>9579 Mr beast stole it from tpot