dthunt comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: elharo 01 May 2014 09:45AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 06 May 2014 01:21:23AM 0 points [-]

If you take people across a big swath of humanities, and ask them about subjects where there is a substantial amount of debate and not a lot of decisive evidence - say, theories of a historical Jesus

Could you have picked an example where one side isn't composed entirely of crackpots?

Comment author: dthunt 06 May 2014 02:37:08AM *  2 points [-]

Depends on your definition of crackpots. I don't think most Jesus scholars are crackpots, just most likely overly credulous of their favored theories.

What I'm curious about is if people in these fields that are starved for really decisive evidence still feel compelled to name a >50% confidence theory, or if they are comfortable with the notion that their most-favored hypothesis indicated by the evidence is still probably wrong, and just comparatively much better than the other hypotheses that they have considered.

Comment author: Fronken 07 May 2014 08:55:29AM 1 point [-]

I think he meant "jesus myth" proponents, who IIRC are ... dubious.

Comment author: dthunt 07 May 2014 04:40:44PM -1 points [-]

Well, hence "historical Jesus". If I were talking about Jesus mythicists, I would have said that. I ignorantly assume there aren't that many Jesus mythicist camps fighting each other out over specific theories of mythicism...

I'm actually looking forward to Richard Carrier's book on that, but I do not expect it to decide mythicism.