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byrnema comments on How to Convince Me That 2 + 2 = 3 - Less Wrong
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I hadn't actually read the grandparent beyond skimming and categorized it as an entirely non-trollish expression of personal belief. Given the prompt in the post it was appropriate to the context and as rational as can be expected given that the guys' beliefs are utter nonsense.
Having read through the first comment (before the "to be continued") the following part jumped out at me as the primary non sequitur.
That just isn't case. Archaeological corroboration provides evidence for the Book's story. That is, part of the story is validated which eliminates a whole lot of the bits that could be wrong and we can assume a correlated truthiness with the remainder of the story. We update p(Book's Story) upward, but not to one. Something along the lines of:
p(Arch | BS) = x
p(Arch | !BS) = y
p(BS | Arch) = p(Arch | BS) * p(BS) / p(Arch)
We do not have the logical deduction "IF Arch THEN BS" but rather a likelyhood ratio such that BS is more likely the less likely it is for the archaelogical evidence is to exist given that the BS is false. Because p(Arch | BS) > p(Arch | !BS), Arch does something to overcome the incredibly low prior probability p(BS).
To put it another way there is a critical observation that deductively "(Book's Story) = (Archeologically verifiable parts) && (parts that are not archeologically verifiable)". This is before we go ahead and calculate p(Mormonism | BS) vs p(Alien | BS).
Another interesting probability calculation to consider is how likely it is that wedrifid will write out a bunch of probability calculations given the clearly false 'truth' proposition is the acronym of "Book's Story" vs wedrifid writing out a bunch of calculations about bullshit given the acronym is not BS. From this we can go ahead and chain our inferences to calculate p(wedrifid is peurile | wedrifid writes out the calculations). For what it is worth I think you should find that the likelyhood ratio is small even if your posterior is enormous.
I gather the discussion of the whole thread rests on this unexpected premise:
Stories always have a blend of fact and fiction. Accounts of travels, culture and civilizations may have some seeds of truth, but other parts about God's intentions and angels needn't be true.
My sense is that you are collectively underestimating how unpredictably information can pass down family lines and through traveling story-tellers, scholars and historians.
There's a lot packed into this. To give an analogy for a non-theistic example, if some details prove correct about the collective community's awareness of the lost location of Atlantis, Hans Christian Anderson shouldn't get credit for 'knowing' these details when he included them in The Little Mermaid.