ChrisHallquist comments on Steelmanning Young Earth Creationism - Less Wrong

2 Post author: ChrisHallquist 17 February 2014 07:17AM

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Comment author: ChrisHallquist 17 February 2014 06:35:51PM -1 points [-]

I don't know, the kinds of YECists I see...

But if we're steelmanning, couldn't we build a better YEC?

Comment author: IlyaShpitser 17 February 2014 06:50:51PM *  2 points [-]

I don't think so, because to approximate how YECists behave out in the wild you would have to, for instance, create a "YECist Bayesian" with a prior so strong it effectively ignored arbitrary mountains of data. This is not how, for instance, the Catholic Church behaved historically.

The problem is this: "the stupid is conserved under sensible transformations."

If you are not concerned with approximating the YECist behavior, you will set up an actual Bayesian who will just move away from their weird prior fairly quickly (many folks from that background do precisely this, it's called "deconversion.")