I understand that the authors of the Linda thought experiment meant her as a place holder for a set of many. The problem is that when I first heard that example as a student, and a lot of other examples in applied probability, I didn’t understand the functional difference between a set of one and a set of many, and sloppily worded examples like the Linda thought experiment reinforced my mistaken impression that one event outcome can have a probabilistic distribution. The main reason I think it matters is because it leads people to start thinking of probability as a force that can effect one event, rather than what it really is, a simple observation of how multiple outcomes will distribute under the influence of the complex forces shaping them.
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