← All writing Final · Nov 2025 · Updated Sep 2026

Why Hypotheticals Matter

Hypotheticals can feel like a dodge. A conversation about weight loss shows how they strip away today's noise so we can see the causes underneath.

Introduction

At our Saturday rationalist meet-up this week, we had a spirited conversation about health: why people struggle with weight, what actually works, and what we owe each other in terms of effort. It started practical, the kind of conversation you could have standing in a grocery aisle.

One participant made a thoughtful, straightforward case:

“We know what works. Don’t bring junk food into the house. Don’t keep tempting things around. Move your body regularly. Use small bursts of willpower. If people don’t do these things, it isn’t mysterious—it’s avoidable.”

This view deserves respect. It works for many people, and it voices an honest frustration: watching loved ones, or yourself, struggle when the solutions seem simple, even if they aren’t easy.

I offered a different angle, and to make my point I posed a hypothetical. It did not go over well. “I don’t like hypotheticals,” they said. “They don’t seem practical.”

I understand. When you’re trying to solve a real problem, an imagined future can feel evasive. But I think hypotheticals aren’t detours from real problems. They are one of our best tools for testing whether we understand a problem at all.

1. Two Explanations of the Same Struggle

My angle came from Technohumanism, my attempt to explain human nature, scarcity, and the purpose of technology. Here is just enough of it. Technology turns scarcity into abundance. But our biology was shaped in scarcity, and our environment now offers abundance. The two don’t match. I call this misalignment. Food is the clearest case: it is now cheap, everywhere, and engineered to exploit wiring from the Paleolithic era, while our hunger still behaves as though the next meal is uncertain.

Seen this way, the common-sense advice is rational: if abundance causes misalignment, add scarcity back into your own environment. Don’t buy the chips. And willpower really has helped many people.

The trouble is that the environment is always on, and biology is always on, but willpower isn’t. It is inconsistent and often fragile. That is not a moral judgment; it’s how bodies work. It’s also why, I’d argue, the biggest gains in human wellbeing have come less from heroic discipline than from better tools: medicine, agriculture, sanitation, refrigeration, vaccines. These don’t strengthen willpower. They change the environment and the body.

So the Technohumanist conjecture is that when abundance creates misalignment, the lasting fix isn’t self-denial forever. It’s new technology that realigns us.

2. The Hypothetical as a Test

To bridge our two perspectives, I asked:

“Imagine we had a safe, inexpensive drug that gave nearly everyone ‘food freedom’—an internal off-switch for hunger. Would we still say that people who struggle today are failing morally?”

This isn’t fantasy for its own sake. It’s a consistency test. If the drug existed, nothing about anyone’s character would change; only the difficulty would. So if we would stop blaming people once a cheap, universal hunger drug existed, then the blame never tracked character, only difficulty.

The drug isn’t pure fantasy, either. GLP-1 drugs, which I discuss in Technohumanism, are an early, expensive version of it. The hypothetical only asks us to imagine the cheap, universal version.

The two explanations also predict different outcomes, so the hypothetical tests them as well:

If weight struggles come mainly from a failure of character, taking away hunger shouldn’t change much about who succeeds.
If they come mainly from biological misalignment, taking away hunger should change outcomes dramatically.

That is the point of the exercise. The hypothetical removes today’s noise long enough for us to see the causal structure underneath.

3. Perception Is a Construction

Why should imagined worlds tell us anything about the real one? Because our perception of the real one isn’t a direct view either.

Perception is a model built by the brain: partial, fallible, and useful. So what feels true isn’t always what is true. That isn’t a criticism of anyone at the meet-up; it’s how cognition works for all of us.

If perception is a model, we need ways to check whether the model would still make sense outside the narrow slice of the world we’ve experienced. Hypotheticals are how we ask:

Would this explanation still hold if the environment changed?
Would it survive under different constraints?
Would it apply to a future with new technology?

Without hypotheticals, we can only test our beliefs against the present, and the present is one small corner of the possible. A hypothetical tests where our models fail.

4. What the Hypothetical Revealed

Back to the conversation. Here is what the hypothetical showed that wasn’t obvious in the moment:

It isolated the causal factor. It asks what happens when hunger is removed and everything else stays the same. If the struggle largely disappears, biology, not virtue, was doing most of the work. Early GLP-1 results point the same way: many people who take them lose weight that years of effort didn’t shift.
It exposed a hidden value judgment. If we would stop blaming people once the drug existed, the moral framing depends on difficulty, not character. The shame attached to weight was never fundamental.
It explored a counterfactual. If changing biology changes behavior, that tells us something real about the structure of the problem.
It pointed toward a better explanation. An explanation that holds across many imagined scenarios has more reach than one that only fits today.

This is Popper’s idea at work: we make progress by conjecturing explanations and trying to refute them, and we keep the ones that survive. A hypothetical is a cheap way to attempt that refutation before reality does it for us.

None of this refutes the common-sense view. It puts it in context. Technohumanism explains why the advice works for many people, why it fails for many others, and how future tools might resolve the tension. You don’t have to accept my further conjecture, that the lasting path to aligned abundance is changing our biology, to see that this is a more general explanation than the advice alone.

Conclusion: A Bold Conjecture

So why do hypotheticals matter, even when they feel annoying? Because they test our explanations against worlds we haven’t lived in, and that is where hidden assumptions show themselves. The drug hypothetical didn’t dismiss the advice about junk food. It showed what the advice depends on.

Here is the conjecture that ties this together:

A civilization’s ability to reason well is proportional to its ability to inhabit hypothetical worlds.

My conversation at the meet-up taught me that common sense grounds us and hypotheticals expand us. We need both. But if we refuse to imagine different worlds, we lose the ability to choose better ones.