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roland comments on Extreme Rationality: It's Not That Great - Less Wrong
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Former christian here. Every once in a while, I catch myself about to--or worse, in the middle of--recounting an explanation like the one you just gave for which I have no evidence other than some pastor's word. On more than one of those occasions, the recalled explanation was just wrong. I haven't googled your explanation here, so it's possible that there's lots of evidence for it, but my prior for that is fairly low (it seems like a really specific piece of cultural information, and it pattern matches against "story that reinterprets well known biblical passage in a way that makes the inconvenient and obvious interpretation incorrect").
I'm incredibly pessimistic about the abilities of the average christian pastor at weighing the evidence for multiple competing historical hypotheses and coming up with the most correct answer (it's basically their job to be bad at this). I know that reversed stupidity is not intelligence, but as a rule I no longer repeat things I "learned" in a church setting unless I've independently verified it.
(Oh, and: my apologies if you came by that story via a more rigorous process.)
I didn't learn that in a church setting, I read it on the internet in a page that claimed this to be the result of some scholar. What I liked most about the explanation is that it makes sense of the weird examples: cheek slapping(usually men use their fists if they mean to be aggressive) and forcing someone to walk a mile(makes sense if you assume the roman occupation context). So it is the best explanation I heard up to date, sigh.
Hm, as Caspian says it shows up on wikipedia.
I think I have heard a garbled version of this story before, which probably contributed to my skepticism (which, if you squint just right, makes my prior comment an example of the thing I was protesting).
Anyway, I'll retract the accusatory nature of my prior comment. I'm still pretty skeptical, but I don't care enough to read the book wikipedia references. :)
I noticed after posting that roland had linked to the same wikipedia page I did with nearly the same URL in his earlier comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/9p/extreme_rationality_its_not_that_great/6gc
Looks like we both missed it.
Huh. I recall reading the rest of that comment. Joke's on me, I guess.
I encountered an identical explanation on the History Channel a decade ago (this was back when the history channel was actually about history beyond Nostradamus and Hitler).