I’m going to guess you couldn’t. It’s not just the words, it’s ideas behind the words. You are using concepts way beyond a four-, five- or six-year-old there.
Well, sort of. But that leaves out a very big question, which is the odds of either thing being true to begin with. If we know A causes B and we know ~B, then in most real life scenarios that should to some degree or other shift our belief about the probability of A a little bit. But if you don’t know P(A) then what is it shifting it from and what is it shifting it to? In reality, if we could do the math, maybe it would change P(A) from 0.05 to 0.04. Maybe it would change it from 0.999999 to 0.999998. In common usage, “evidence of something” means it makes a significant shift in our reason to believe that thing. Fingerprints on a murder weapon is evidence of murder. Having been in the same city a week before the murder is not, even though in a Bayesian sense I’m 100% sure it increases the likelihood of having committed the murder. Absence of evidence is rarely evidence of absence in that sense.
My big question about the book is what it says about the *kid* dying. My four-year-old hasn't had anyone she knows die, but she worries about dying a lot. We straight up lie and say that she isn't going to die for a very long time and point to her nonagenarian great grandmother as evidence that you get to live to be very old. The reality that she could die any day but that it isn't very likely seems beyond her grasp.
I’ve never worried that much about explaining the death of an elderly person to her, or talking to her about how it makes her feel. It’s really her fear of death that seems like a big problem.
