shminux comments on Open thread, Jan. 19 - Jan. 25, 2015 - Less Wrong

3 Post author: Gondolinian 19 January 2015 12:04AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (302)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: shminux 20 January 2015 12:46:43AM *  0 points [-]

General question: I've read somewhere that there's a Bayesian approach to at least partially justifying simplicity arguments / Occam's Razor. Where can I find a good accessible explanation of this?

This is a good question, but not when applied to the origin of the Torah example. There a more appropriate discussion is of the motivated cognition of the original Talmudic authors, who would have happily attributed 100% of the Torah to the same source, were it not for the 8 verses which do not fit. For a Christian these authors are already suspect because they denied the first coming of the Messiah, so one's priors of their trustworthiness should be low to begin with.