You can’t say “equiprobable” if you have no known set of possible outcomes to begin with.
Genuine question: what are your opinions on the breakfast hypothetical? [The idea that being able to give an answer to “how would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast today?” is a good intelligence test, because only idiots are resistant to “evaluating counterfactuals”.]
This isn’t just a gotcha; I have my own opinions and they’re not exactly the conventional ones.
You can’t say “equiprobable” if you have no known set of possible outcomes to begin with.
Not really. Nothing prevents us from reasoning about a set with unknown number of elements and saying that measure is spreaded equally among them, no matter how many of them there is. But this is irrelevant to the question at hand.
We know very well the size of set of possible outcomes for “In which ten billion interval your birth rank could’ve been”. This size is 1. No amount of pregnancy complications could postpone or hurry your birth so that you managed to be in a different 10 billion group.
Genuine question: what are your opinions on the breakfast hypothetical?
I think it’s prudent to be careful about counterfactual reasoning on general principles. And among other reasons for it, to prevent the kind of mistake that you seem to be making: confusing
A) I’ve thrown a six sided die, even though I could’ve thrown a 20 sided one, what is the probability to observe 6?
and
B) I’ve thrown a six sided die, what would be the probability to observe 6, if I’ve thrown a 20 sided die instead?
The fact that question B has an answer doesn’t mean that question A has the same answer as well.
As for whether breakfast hypothetical is a good intelligence test, I doubt it. I can’t remember a single person whom I’ve seen have problems with intuitive understanding of counterfactual reasoning. On the other hand I’ve seen a bunch of principled hard determinists who didn’t know how to formalize “couldness” in a compatibilist way and threfore were not sure that counterfactuals are coherent on philosophical grounds. At best the distribution of the intelligence is going to be bi-modal.
You can’t say “equiprobable” if you have no known set of possible outcomes to begin with.
Genuine question: what are your opinions on the breakfast hypothetical? [The idea that being able to give an answer to “how would you feel if you hadn’t eaten breakfast today?” is a good intelligence test, because only idiots are resistant to “evaluating counterfactuals”.]
This isn’t just a gotcha; I have my own opinions and they’re not exactly the conventional ones.
Not really. Nothing prevents us from reasoning about a set with unknown number of elements and saying that measure is spreaded equally among them, no matter how many of them there is. But this is irrelevant to the question at hand.
We know very well the size of set of possible outcomes for “In which ten billion interval your birth rank could’ve been”. This size is 1. No amount of pregnancy complications could postpone or hurry your birth so that you managed to be in a different 10 billion group.
I think it’s prudent to be careful about counterfactual reasoning on general principles. And among other reasons for it, to prevent the kind of mistake that you seem to be making: confusing
A) I’ve thrown a six sided die, even though I could’ve thrown a 20 sided one, what is the probability to observe 6?
and
B) I’ve thrown a six sided die, what would be the probability to observe 6, if I’ve thrown a 20 sided die instead?
The fact that question B has an answer doesn’t mean that question A has the same answer as well.
As for whether breakfast hypothetical is a good intelligence test, I doubt it. I can’t remember a single person whom I’ve seen have problems with intuitive understanding of counterfactual reasoning. On the other hand I’ve seen a bunch of principled hard determinists who didn’t know how to formalize “couldness” in a compatibilist way and threfore were not sure that counterfactuals are coherent on philosophical grounds. At best the distribution of the intelligence is going to be bi-modal.