[mshake2]

It's not an unreal scenario at all. It's entirely plausible that a company falls apart when lacking the specific motivators and pressures that Jobs brought, and therefore never really exists in the first place. What's unreal about that?

[ben_w]

The unreal part is there being only two options. Most dichotomies are false.

[mshake2]

I addressed why the hypothetical is limited to two options, and taking a subset of plausible scenarios does not reduce the plausibility of the selected scenarios.

[ben_w]

P(a) = 0.1, P(b) = 0.1, P(c) = 0.8, "Oh, let's only look at cases a and b".

[mshake2]

Yes, because a and b represent a specific combination I said I was interested in exploring. What you've shown doesn't lower the plausibility of those scenarios. Are you being intentionally contrarian or is there a reason why you are trying to muddy a simple thought experiment?

[ben_w]

That makes it unreal. It changed the environment too much to exclude it. Ignoring it breaks stuff. I'm not saying thought experiments are bad — do them often myself — I'm saying my response to get thought experiment itself is: it can't work like that (riffing of an unrelated but recent comment from yesterday where I'm the one doing the thought experiment as an existence proof, it's a "spherical cow in a vacuum" model).

[mshake2]

It's not a nonsensical "spherical cow in vacuum" thought experiment to say "Pixar exists but some employees are treated bad" vs "Pixar doesn't exist". If you think that it becomes impossible for a rational mind to weigh those two choices, then there's no point in me continuing this discussion with you.