"Philosophically", okay. (or "mentally").torno said:That's how I see it. Scientifically (or mathematically, whatever) the odds are 1/6999999999 because of the number of people. Philisophically, it's 50/50 because it's either him, or not.WanderingFool said:The way you see it, there is a 50/50 chance, which is right, in a sense.
But the odds of your friend dying are actually the 1 to 7 billion. To you, its a 50/50
Care to explain to us how Philosophical Probability Theory works ?
The human brain's inability to grasp probabilities isn't in itself a rule of probabilities.
It makes none to me. The answer to a probabilities problem CAN depend on the phrasing... if the change in phrasing changes the problem. In your case I don't see how it does. Just because there are two options doesn't mean they have equal probabilities, and the odds of "anyone else" dying are the same as the odds of "someone else" - if anyone is the collective, it's a collective that has much greater odds of one of its component parts dying than of the friend dying. The odds are 6999999999/7000000000. It's like someone is shooting a very inaccurate gun that will hit a random place in a room containing an elephant and a mosquito. The elephant and the mosquito aren't equally likely to get hit.Dr Druza said:However, the question of whether you use 50/50 or 1/7 BIL is a matter of how you phrase the question:
Chances of friend dying vs anyone else: 50/50
Chances of friend dying vs someone else: 1/7 BIL
Someone being one person, anyone being the collective 7 BIL people represented as one "person" (anyone).
I think that makes sense...
That may be an accurate depiction of the psychological realities, but it doesn't make 1/7 BIL irrelevant, it makes all probabilities irrelevant. So I don't know where you get the 50/50. When I'm seeing things that way I usually conceptualize it as the "probability" of every outcome being 1. (because they all have a chance of happening, and once they've happened they'll have completely happened, not 1/7 BIL happened). But that has nothing to do with actual probabilities.I always think of these type of things as 50/50, because ultimately, you can re-do that event 1,000 times over and kill your friend in every instance. Because of this fact, the 1/7 BIL becomes irrelevant.