Thanks. Carl, jimrandomh and you have helped me understand what the original formulation says about probabilities, but I still can’t understand why it says that. My grandparent comment and its sibling can be interpreted as arguments against the original formulation, what do you think about them?
In general I’m a lousy one to ask about probability; I only noticed this particular thing after a few days of contemplation. I was more hoping that someone else would see it and be able to use it to form a more coherent explanation.
I do think, regarding the sibling, that creating or destroying people is incompatible with assuming that a certain number of people will exist—I expect that a hypothesis that would generate that prediction would have an implicit assumption that nobody is going to be creating or destroying or failing to create people on the basis of the existence of the hypothesis. In other words, causation doesn’t work like that.
Edit: It might help to note that the original point that led me to notice that your formulation was flawed was that the different worlds—represented by the different colors—were not equally likely. If you pick a ball out of your urn and don’t look at the number, it’s much more likely to be green than yellow and very very unlikely to be red. If you pick a ball out of my urn, there’s an even chance of it being any of the three colors.
Thanks. Carl, jimrandomh and you have helped me understand what the original formulation says about probabilities, but I still can’t understand why it says that. My grandparent comment and its sibling can be interpreted as arguments against the original formulation, what do you think about them?
In general I’m a lousy one to ask about probability; I only noticed this particular thing after a few days of contemplation. I was more hoping that someone else would see it and be able to use it to form a more coherent explanation.
I do think, regarding the sibling, that creating or destroying people is incompatible with assuming that a certain number of people will exist—I expect that a hypothesis that would generate that prediction would have an implicit assumption that nobody is going to be creating or destroying or failing to create people on the basis of the existence of the hypothesis. In other words, causation doesn’t work like that.
Edit: It might help to note that the original point that led me to notice that your formulation was flawed was that the different worlds—represented by the different colors—were not equally likely. If you pick a ball out of your urn and don’t look at the number, it’s much more likely to be green than yellow and very very unlikely to be red. If you pick a ball out of my urn, there’s an even chance of it being any of the three colors.