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Why Hypotheticals Matter

Even when they feel annoying. How thought experiments reveal what's hidden by everyday noise.

Even When They Feel Annoying

Buddy Williams · November 16, 2025

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 and grounded, the kind of conversation you can 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 position deserves respect. It works for many real people. It’s not theoretical, it’s practical. It’s also emotionally honest—it expresses frustration at watching loved ones (or oneself) struggle when seemingly simple solutions exist, even if they are not easy.

I genuinely appreciated the clarity of their view.

As the discussion went on, I offered a different angle—one shaped by Technohumanism, which is my attempt to understand human nature, scarcity, and the purpose of technology. The post you’re reading isn’t a full Technohumanism explanation—just enough of it to illuminate why hypotheticals matter more than they seem.

Where Our Perspectives Diverged

I argued that willpower is inconsistent, often fragile, and—crucially—not biologically “always on.” Environment and biology constantly push us around. That’s not a moral judgment; it’s just how bodies work.

I also said that, historically, the biggest improvements in human wellbeing have come not from heroic discipline but from better tools—medicine, agriculture, sanitation, refrigeration, vaccines. These aren’t tiny tweaks to willpower. They’re structural transformations of the environment and the body.

In Technohuman terms:

Technology exists to turn scarcity into abundance. And when abundance creates misalignment with our biology—as with food today—the solution isn’t self-privation forever. The solution is new technology that realigns us.

To bridge our two perspectives, I offered a hypothetical:

“Imagine it’s 15 years in the future and we have a safe, inexpensive drug that gives nearly everyone ‘food freedom’—an internal off-switch for hunger. Would we still say that people who struggle today are failing morally?”

This scenario did not go over well. The person I was speaking with admitted, candidly:

“I don’t like hypotheticals. They don’t seem practical.”

And I get that. Truly. When you’re trying to solve a real problem, a fictional future drug can feel irrelevant, even evasive.

But this is exactly the moment where Technohumanism—and Popperian thinking—show why hypotheticals aren’t distractions. They’re instruments that reveal what’s hidden by the noise of everyday life.

With hypotheticals, we can peer into the true nature of our problems. Common sense may be useful in today’s situation, but hypotheticals let us check whether our explanation would hold up in a different one.

Why Hypotheticals Feel Like Detours

When someone says, “Just stop buying junk food,” that advice may fit in certain situations—where food is abundant, tempting, and engineered to exploit biological wiring from the Paleolithic era.

Technohumanism calls this misalignment. Our biology was shaped in scarcity. Our environment now offers abundance. And the two don’t match.

From this lens, the common-sense advice is understandable: if abundance creates misalignment, then artificially adding scarcity back into your environment (don’t buy the chips) seems like the rational fix. It’s also true that exercising willpower has helped many.

But here’s the problem: The environment is always on. Biology is always on. Willpower isn’t.

A hypothetical future drug is not a fantasy in this context. It’s a way to test the underlying explanation:

If the problem is truly moral failure, a drug shouldn’t change outcomes.
If the problem is biological misalignment, a drug should change everything.

And in our shared imaginary future, the entire moral framing collapses instantly. That collapse is the point. A hypothetical stripped away today’s noise long enough for us to see the structure underneath.

A thought experiment isolates the causal story behind the effects we see.

Perception is a Construction

Here’s the piece that explains why hypotheticals matter, even if you don’t naturally enjoy them:

Human perception isn’t a direct view of reality. It’s a model built by the brain—a fallible, partial, useful-but-imperfect construction.

Because perception is limited, “what feels true” isn’t always “what is true.” This isn’t a critique of anyone at the meet-up. It’s simply how cognition works.

Once you accept that our perception is a model—not the territory—then you need tools that help you check whether your model would still make sense outside the narrow slice of the world you’ve experienced.

Enter: hypotheticals. They’re 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, you can only test your beliefs against the present. And the present is a local maximum—a tiny ledge in a much larger landscape.

If perception is a construction, hypotheticals test where our constructions fail.

How Thought Experiments Help Us Make Better Sense of Health

Let’s return to the conversation. Here’s what the hypothetical revealed that wasn’t obvious in the moment:

It isolates the actual causal factor. When willpower is removed as a variable, we see that biology—not virtue—was the driving force.
It reveals hidden value judgments. If a future drug dissolves the shame attached to weight struggle, then the shame wasn’t fundamental—it was contextual.
It helps us explore counterfactuals. If biology changes, behavior changes. This tells us something real about the structure of the problem.
It points us toward better explanations. A model that works across multiple imagined scenarios has more reach than one that only fits today.

This is the heart of Popper’s idea: progress happens when explanations survive attempted refutation. And it’s the heart of Technohumanism: technology is the means by which we resolve the friction between biological limits and abundant environments.

Hypotheticals are not abstract—they’re stress tests for our explanations.

Where Technohumanism Fits Naturally

Technohumanism says:

Humans evolved for scarcity.
We now live in an abundance that misaligns with our biology.
Willpower can’t fix that misalignment since it’s not always on.
The only long-term path to aligned abundance is biological augmentation.

You don’t have to accept the entire Technohumanism thesis to appreciate what it offers here:

It gives a more universal explanation for why health struggles persist, and why technology—not discipline—has always been the force that frees us.

This doesn’t invalidate the common-sense view; it contextualizes it.

The meet-up participant’s advice works for many people today. Technohumanism explains why it works, why it fails for many others, and how future tools might resolve the tension entirely.

That’s not preachy. That’s a better explanation.

A Bold Conjecture

Let me close with the idea that ties all of this together:

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

If we refuse to imagine alternatives, we stay trapped in the present. If we learn to inhabit alternatives, we discover better explanations—and better futures.

My conversation at the meet-up taught me something valuable: common sense grounds us, and hypotheticals expand us. We need both.

But without the ability to imagine different worlds, we lose the ability to choose better ones.