Not sure if this is essential to the parable, but wouldn’t it be useful to distinguish between the following cases?:
(1) the boy says every day there’s 5% chance the wolf could come every evening, but isn’t saying the wolf is there right now
and
(2) the boy says there is a wolf in the village whenever he thinks there’s a 5+% chance this is true.
If the boy is doing (1) and the villagers panic now then they’ve just misunderstood what he’s saying. If the boy is doing (2), then you’d understand why the villagers would start ignoring the boy (just like everyone ignores car alarms because they are so oversensitive).
I’m not sure either is neatly analogous to the X-risk case, which is that different people give different estimates and these range from negligible to doom being apparently virtually certain. I guess that’s a bit like there being many different boys in the village, each of whom assigns a different percentage chance to the wolf appearing at some point (but none of whom are claiming it’s literally here now).
Not sure if this is essential to the parable, but wouldn’t it be useful to distinguish between the following cases?:
(1) the boy says every day there’s 5% chance the wolf could come every evening, but isn’t saying the wolf is there right now
and
(2) the boy says there is a wolf in the village whenever he thinks there’s a 5+% chance this is true.
If the boy is doing (1) and the villagers panic now then they’ve just misunderstood what he’s saying. If the boy is doing (2), then you’d understand why the villagers would start ignoring the boy (just like everyone ignores car alarms because they are so oversensitive).
I’m not sure either is neatly analogous to the X-risk case, which is that different people give different estimates and these range from negligible to doom being apparently virtually certain. I guess that’s a bit like there being many different boys in the village, each of whom assigns a different percentage chance to the wolf appearing at some point (but none of whom are claiming it’s literally here now).