Thanks for trying to come up with a thought experiment that targets your intuitions here! That’s exactly what I was hoping people would do.
For me, this thought experiment feels like it raises more “value of complexity” questions than the canonical RC. Though from the comments it seems like complexity vs homogeneity intuitions are contributing to quite a few people’s anti-RC feelings, so it’s not bad to have a thought experiment that targets that.
In any case, I think there probably is a sufficiently large number of years at which I would take the cough drop, all else equal. Certainly I don’t feel extremely strong resistance to the idea of doing so. However, I’m a slightly non-optimal person to pose this thought experiment to, in that I’m not at all sure that my life so far has been good for me on net.
Thanks for trying to come up with a thought experiment that targets your intuitions here! That’s exactly what I was hoping people would do.
For me, this thought experiment feels like it raises more “value of complexity” questions than the canonical RC. Though from the comments it seems like complexity vs homogeneity intuitions are contributing to quite a few people’s anti-RC feelings, so it’s not bad to have a thought experiment that targets that.
In any case, I think there probably is a sufficiently large number of years at which I would take the cough drop, all else equal. Certainly I don’t feel extremely strong resistance to the idea of doing so. However, I’m a slightly non-optimal person to pose this thought experiment to, in that I’m not at all sure that my life so far has been good for me on net.