I mean, Saturn was formed by some process right? And it must be sensitive to some initial conditions that - although maybe not really random, we can treat as random. Now imagine going back in time and changing those conditions a bit so that Saturn ended up differently. Do that 1000 times, giving you 1000 different Saturns. Now pick one randomly.
The point is that you can’t do that. That’s the entire conundrum with Frequentism. They object to stating anything about the probability of Saturn, because from an objectivist point of view, any statement is either true or it isn’t, and therefore all probabilistic statements about it must be 0% or 100%. Instead they resort to statements about the frequencies over the long term from repeated processes, like the one you have. There are two problems with this:
1. They aren’t answering the original question. The question is about the probability of a property of Saturn. Not about the process of repeatedly forming thousands of alternative Saturns. This seems like a subtle difference but that’s only because Frequentism has been the default for so long. It doesn’t attempt to answer the questions people are actually asking.
2. The assumptions it makes to answer that alternative question are just as flawed. We can’t go back in time and change the conditions surrounding Saturn’s creation. We can’t run 1000s of repeated trials of the creation of Saturn. For a group of people so ideologically opposed to a statement as simple as “the probability of this flipped coin being heads is 50%”, it seems absurd that they are fine with their entire framework being built around a premise that doesn’t exist and cannot exist.
In other words, creating a model that has little to do with reality then sampling from it to come up with a result that has little to do with reality.
Yes, I think this is kind of standard practice in many fields.
If someone questions this just quote "all models are wrong, but some are useful" as if the quote is actually saying "all models are wrong, but all models are useful".
We do that right now with computer simulations. Not exactly the hardest of evidence, but if the time machine were possible, someone in the future would have done it by now.
