MugaSofer comments on Welcome to Less Wrong! (5th thread, March 2013) - Less Wrong

27 Post author: orthonormal 01 April 2013 04:19PM

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Comment author: PrawnOfFate 17 April 2013 02:14:27AM *  0 points [-]

How about talking clearly about whatever you are currently hinting at?

Comment author: MugaSofer 17 April 2013 01:49:26PM 0 points [-]

I think Gwern's right on this.

Comment author: PrawnOfFate 17 April 2013 02:16:59PM 2 points [-]

But Humanities has rejected that!

Comment author: HumanitiesResearcher 18 April 2013 05:22:35AM 0 points [-]

Yep. It's not the Bible. I suspect that there are already good stats compiled on the Q-source, etc.

In a way it's not only futile but limiting to play the guessing game. There are lots of possible applications of Bayesian methods to the humanities. Maybe this discussion will help more projects than my own.

Comment author: MugaSofer 19 April 2013 01:18:16PM -2 points [-]

Ah, OK. They hadn't when I wrote it.

Comment author: Nornagest 22 April 2013 05:39:03PM 1 point [-]

That was my first thought too; there's a huge textual analysis tradition relating to the Bible and what I know of it maps pretty closely to the summary, although it's also mature enough that there wouldn't be much reason to obfuscate it like this. But it's not implausible that it applies to some other body of literature. I understand there are some similar things going on in classics, for example.

The specifics shouldn't matter too much, though. Although some types of mark are going to be a lot more machine-distinguishable than others, and that's going to affect the kinds of analysis you can do -- differences in spelling and grammar, for example, are far machine-friendlier than differences in letterforms in a manuscript.