No, Gray_Area’s point (that I can see) was that you would only approximate the result, using cognitive heuristics, for example thinking about how an author would tell the story that starts the way your reality does. There are other, valid ways to do that. But the best known to me is simply Bayesian inference, and keeping track of probability distributions instead of sampling randomly is not that hard, since it saves you the otherwise expensive work of adjusting for biases using ad hoc methods.
No, Gray_Area’s point (that I can see) was that you would only approximate the result, using cognitive heuristics, for example thinking about how an author would tell the story that starts the way your reality does.
There are other, valid ways to do that. But the best known to me is simply Bayesian inference, and keeping track of probability distributions instead of sampling randomly is not that hard, since it saves you the otherwise expensive work of adjusting for biases using ad hoc methods.