The methodology here is empirical: you’ve identified the methods that have worked well to identify the causes X that we have already figured out. But if there were a different heuristic which is actually better at revealing causes—especially the causes which are hidden to the heuristics stated here and therefore hidden to us—then we wouldn’t know about it if we never tried it. And maybe the fact that we’ve tried these heuristics already implies that they’ve done what they can and we should try other heuristics instead. (Maybe it would help if we compiled a list of heuristics which have been tried and didn’t work.)
The third heuristic is less well defined than the other two and I don’t see a good way of formalizing it or systematically searching with it. What does it mean to find a crucial consideration if not just finding a big new cause? But I think a good heuristic which captures the idea behind Bostrom’s argument is to expand our comparisons across wider sets of possible worlds (including possible worlds where different theories of philosophy, etc are true) and take note of conditionally dependent considerations.
Neat. A couple notes:
The methodology here is empirical: you’ve identified the methods that have worked well to identify the causes X that we have already figured out. But if there were a different heuristic which is actually better at revealing causes—especially the causes which are hidden to the heuristics stated here and therefore hidden to us—then we wouldn’t know about it if we never tried it. And maybe the fact that we’ve tried these heuristics already implies that they’ve done what they can and we should try other heuristics instead. (Maybe it would help if we compiled a list of heuristics which have been tried and didn’t work.)
The third heuristic is less well defined than the other two and I don’t see a good way of formalizing it or systematically searching with it. What does it mean to find a crucial consideration if not just finding a big new cause? But I think a good heuristic which captures the idea behind Bostrom’s argument is to expand our comparisons across wider sets of possible worlds (including possible worlds where different theories of philosophy, etc are true) and take note of conditionally dependent considerations.