Thought experiments are a great way to understand yourself better, and to make explicit what is normally implicit. Ex: “If you must choose between letting a random baby or elderly person die, which would you choose?”
But thought experiments also suffer from problems:
1. It can be difficult to accurately imagine a world that incorporates the stipulations of the thought experiment.
Ex: “Suppose that you suddenly stopped experiencing any fear and any empathy - what would you change ...
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second-order effects
Robust Good
People often underestimate how brittle attempts to improve the world are.
Altruism, at a large scale, often hinges on a chain of assumptions/requirements, such as:
A & B & C & D & E
One broken link in the chain means it looks like you're doing good but you're not really doing it.
For example, to help the world by delivering medicine, the chain might look like this:
The medicine reliably cures the disease
& the side effects are not worse than being...
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