I use entities outside human experience in thought experiments for the sake of preventing Clever Humans from trying to game the analogy with their inferences.
“If Monty ‘replaced’ a grain of sand with a diamond then the diamond might be near the top, so I choose the first bucket.”
“Monty wants to keep the diamond for himself, so if he’s offering to trade with me, he probably thinks I have it and wants to get it back.”
It might seem paradoxical, but using ‘transmute at random’ instead of ‘replace’, or ‘Omega’ instead of ‘Monty Hall’, actually simplifies the problem for me by establishing that all relevant facts to the problem have already been included. That never seems to happen in the real world, so the world of the analogy is usefully unreal.
I use entities outside human experience in thought experiments for the sake of preventing Clever Humans from trying to game the analogy with their inferences.
“If Monty ‘replaced’ a grain of sand with a diamond then the diamond might be near the top, so I choose the first bucket.”
“Monty wants to keep the diamond for himself, so if he’s offering to trade with me, he probably thinks I have it and wants to get it back.”
It might seem paradoxical, but using ‘transmute at random’ instead of ‘replace’, or ‘Omega’ instead of ‘Monty Hall’, actually simplifies the problem for me by establishing that all relevant facts to the problem have already been included. That never seems to happen in the real world, so the world of the analogy is usefully unreal.
I really like this technique.