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dthunt comments on Rationality Quotes May 2014 - Less Wrong
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I'm rather curious;
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 - how many of those people are going to describe one of those theories as more likely than not?
Like, if you have dozens of theories that you've studied and examined closely, are we going to see people assigning >50% to their favored theory? Or will people be a lot more conservative with their confidence?
Could you have picked an example where one side isn't composed entirely of crackpots?
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.
I think he meant "jesus myth" proponents, who IIRC are ... dubious.
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.