I don’t claim it’s sufficient, I just claim it’s possible. And while it’s true that most civilizations would see a galaxy teeming with life, somebody’s gotta be first.
Anything’s possible. If your claim is interesting, it’s because it’s probable, at least relative to its explanatory rivals.
The problem with ‘somebody’s gotta be first’ is that it’s either a fully general explanation or no explanation at all. Suppose you and a hundred billion of your friends are each assigned a distinct number between 1 and a hundred billion. You’re assigned the number 1. Should you dismiss this surprising outcome because ‘someone had to get 1’? No. Not without a lot of evidence that it’s a coincidence, anyway. The fact that someone had to get 1 only means that it was possible, on the terms on the game, for you to get 1. It doesn’t make that possibility, when it occurs, any less surprising or confusing. The goal of explaining our observations isn’t to show that they’re possible; it’s to show that they’re a lot more likely than they would have been in the absence of the explanans.
‘Someone had to win’ isn’t a full explanation on its own, no. (If it were, it would be a fully general explanation schema; ‘something had to happen’, for example, can explain any event.) Rather, ‘someone had to win’ is an explanation for an unlikely victory when you posit a large sample space. In most cases, selection bias will also play a role in the explanation—it will account for the prima facie salience or interestingness of the event.
If selection bias and the size of the sample space don’t help make you any less confused about why some X happened to you, then revisiting ‘someone had to X’ shouldn’t alleviate your confusion.
I don’t claim it’s sufficient, I just claim it’s possible. And while it’s true that most civilizations would see a galaxy teeming with life, somebody’s gotta be first.
Anything’s possible. If your claim is interesting, it’s because it’s probable, at least relative to its explanatory rivals.
The problem with ‘somebody’s gotta be first’ is that it’s either a fully general explanation or no explanation at all. Suppose you and a hundred billion of your friends are each assigned a distinct number between 1 and a hundred billion. You’re assigned the number 1. Should you dismiss this surprising outcome because ‘someone had to get 1’? No. Not without a lot of evidence that it’s a coincidence, anyway. The fact that someone had to get 1 only means that it was possible, on the terms on the game, for you to get 1. It doesn’t make that possibility, when it occurs, any less surprising or confusing. The goal of explaining our observations isn’t to show that they’re possible; it’s to show that they’re a lot more likely than they would have been in the absence of the explanans.
I would be surprised because that violates the pigeonhole principle.
(Yeah, I’m a programmer.)
Isn’t “someone had to win” the rationalist explanation for most lottery winners?
‘Someone had to win’ isn’t a full explanation on its own, no. (If it were, it would be a fully general explanation schema; ‘something had to happen’, for example, can explain any event.) Rather, ‘someone had to win’ is an explanation for an unlikely victory when you posit a large sample space. In most cases, selection bias will also play a role in the explanation—it will account for the prima facie salience or interestingness of the event.
If selection bias and the size of the sample space don’t help make you any less confused about why some X happened to you, then revisiting ‘someone had to X’ shouldn’t alleviate your confusion.