You’re thinking whether to become an assembly-line worker or an artist. Then you reflect on the value of knowledge. And you become a factory worker, on the grounds that if you become an assembly-line worker, you will know what you’ll be doing every working day of your future, but if you’re an artist, your activities will be unpredictable.
Some remarks. First, there is something perverse about using the value of knowledge in this way. The normal way to pursue the value of knowledge is to find out things that are independent of your pursuit. But here you are pursuing knowledge by making there be less to know about the world (or your world). Yet, paradoxically, it sure seems like the line of thought above makes sense.
Second, the my initial story depends on Molinism being false. For if there are comprehensive subjective conditionals of free will, then by becoming an artist you get to know the conditionals about what you would do in the various artistic situations you’re in. But on the assembly line story, you don’t get to know these. So the Molinist doesn’t have the paradox. I suppose that’s a bit of evidence for Molinism.
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