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grouchymusicologist comments on Mini-review: 'Proving History: Bayes' Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus' - Less Wrong
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Comments (34)
Boy, do I ever agree with this. I would love to be able to cite Carrier's work (edit: that is, his methodological program) without appearing to take on the baggage of interest in an area that is simultaneously irrelevant and mindkilling -- that is, in which having opinions might be taken as chiefly an indication of tribalism.
Certainly, to really get the attention of historians who might benefit from using Bayes, it does make sense to present the method in conjunction with an application of the method -- preferably one that leads to a really striking, counterintuitive claim being argued for. But the cultural loadedness of using Jesus studies seems likely to forestall Carrier's work having that result.
Tangentially: Perhaps it's emblematic that McCullagh's (non-Bayesian) Justifying Historical Descriptions has a preface that concludes with these sentences: "Finally I would like to acknowledge what I believe to have been God's guidance and support in the production of this book. It is just a pity that the clay He had to mould was so recalcitrant! Please praise Him for what is true in it, and forgive me for what is not." McCullagh does, in fact, present some useful heuristics for historians to use.
By the way, I came across an example of Bayesian methods being employed in a music theory paper. Since you're probably more familiar with the recent theoretical literature than I am, do you perhaps know whether this is a trend?
(I think Bayes does belong in music theory, but the way I have in mind is a bit different from what we see in that paper.)
Wow, that's very interesting. I haven't seen any use of Bayesian methods along similar lines in music theory -- that is, to try to account for otherwise opaque compositional motivations on the part of an individual composer. I look forward to reading the article more closely, thank you for passing it along.
Where Bayes is beginning to crop up more often is in explicitly computational music theory, such as corpus music research and music cognition. I have a colleague who (among other things) develops key-finding algorithms on a large corpus of tonal music, in which Bayes's theorem is sometimes useful. I don't know for sure how much of that has appeared in print so far, since it isn't my area, but I know it's a tool that researchers are aware of.
I have a grudge against this topic for two reasons. One is that this is how I discovered that the tribal signaling aspect of belief doesn't follow the expected conjunction rules. Among secular Jews,
The other is that people trying to write the phrase "the historicity of Jesus" will write "the histocracy of Jesus" maybe .1% of the time, which clogs my Google results.
What the hell is "histocracy"? The rule of tissues? I have never seen it, even as a typo.
Histocracy Is HonoreDB's idea for goup decision making.
Somehow I missed that article, thanks.