Helpfully, log scales are off from each other by a constant factor, so whatever techniques they use ln for can be used just as well for log base 2. Just update any constants to the correct (much prettier) values.

The fear of cults, and the related fear of cults of personality, are antimemes against excessive awe of persons.

(I think the last time I heard the word “jungle” used literally to refer to rainforest was probably in Jumanji.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jungle#As_metaphor

Jungle? Didn't we live on the savannah?

It didn't even occur to me to interpret “In the jungle of” literally, to the point that I didn't even notice it contained the word “jungle” until I Ctrl-F'd for it.

Jungle? Didn't we live on the savannah?

LOL it was just a turn of phrase.

And forming groups for survival, it seems just as plausible that we formed groups for availability of mates.

Genetically speaking mate-availability is a component to survival. My understanding of the forces that increased group size is that they are more complex than either of these (big groups win conflicts for terrritory, but food availability (via tool use) and travel speed are limiting factors I believe - big groups only work if you can access a lot of food and move on before stripping the place barren), but I was writing a very short characterisation and I'm happy to acknowledge minor innacuracies. Perhaps I'll think about tightening up the language or removing that part as you suggest - I probably wrote that it far too casually.

For example, Adolf Hitler lived while Ernst Rohm died

Nice example. Although Hitler did die anyway. And I think a decent part of the reason was his inability to reason effectively and make strategically sound decisions. Of course I think most people are kinda glad he was strategically irrational... In any case I think you're right the charisma is still useful but my suggestion is that truth-seeking (science etc) has increased in usefulness over time, whereas charisma is probably roughly the same as it has been for a long time.

structured as a story, a chronology

Perhaps I should make the winning section more storylike to make focus on its point rather than it being a scientific guide to that subtopic. Or maybe I just need to rethink it... The core point seems to have been received well at least.

This is from a novel (Three Parts Dead by Max Gladstone). The situation is a man and a woman who have to work together but have trouble trusting each other because of propaganda from an old war:

[Abelard] hesitated, suddenly aware that he was alone with a woman he barely trusted, a woman who, had they met only a few decades before, would have tried to kill him and destroy the gods he served. Tara hated propaganda for this reason. Stories always outlasted their usefulness.

Colin Howson, talking about how Cox's theorem bears the mark of Cox's training as a physicist (source):

An alternative approach is to start immediately with a quantitative notion and think of general principles that any acceptable numerical measure of uncertainty should obey. R.T. Cox and I.J. Good, working independently in the mid nineteen-forties, showed how strikingly little in the way of constraints on a numerical measure yield the finitely additive probability functions as canonical representations. It is not just the generality of the assumptions that makes the Cox–Good result so significant: unlike some of those which have to be imposed on a qualitative probability ordering, the assumptions used by Cox and to a somewhat lesser extent Good seem to have the property of being uniformly self-evidently analytic principles of numerical epistemic probability whatever particular scale it might be measured in. Cox was a working physicist and his point of departure was a typical one: to look for invariant principles:

To consider first ... what principles of probable inference will hold however probability is measured. Such principles, if there are any, will play in the theory of probable inference a part like that of Carnot’s principle in thermodynamics, which holds for all possible scales of temperature, or like the parts played in mechanics by the equations of Lagrange and Hamilton, which have the same form no matter what system of coordinates is used in the description of motion. [Cox 1961]

I like this post, I like the example, I like the point that science is newer than debate and so we're probably more naturally inclined to debate. I don't like the apparently baseless storytelling.

In the jungle of our evolutionary childhood, humanity formed groups to survive. In these groups there was a hierachy of importance, status and power. Predators, starvation, rival groups and disease all took the weak on a regular basis, but the groups afforded a partial protection. However, a violent or unpleasant death still remained a constant threat. It was of particular threat to the lowest and weakest members of the group. Sometimes these individuals were weak because they were physically weak. However, over time groups that allowed and rewarded things other than physical strength became more successful. In these groups, discussion played a much greater role in power and status. The truely strong individuals, the winners in this new arena were one's that could direct converstation in their favour - conversations about who will do what, about who got what, and about who would be punished for what. Debates were fought with words, but they could end in death all the same.

I don't know much about the environment of evolutionary adaptation, but it sounds like you don't either. Jungle? Didn't we live on the savannah? And forming groups for survival, it seems just as plausible that we formed groups for availability of mates.

If you don't know what the EEA was like, why use it as an example? All you really know is about the modern world. I think reasoning about the modern world makes your point quite well in fact. There are still plenty of people living and dying dependent on their persuasive ability. For example, Adolf Hitler lived while Ernst Rohm died. And we can guess that it's been like this since the beginning of humanity and that this has bred us to have certain behaviors.

I think this reasoning is a lot more reliable, in fact, than imagining what the EEA was like without any education in the subject.

Maybe I'm being pedantic--the middle of the post is structured as a story, a chronology. It definitely reads nicely that way.

Philosophically, I want to know how you calculate the rational degree of belief in every proposition.

If you automatically assign the axioms an actually unobtainable certainty, you don't get the rational degree of belief in every proposition, as the set of "propositions" includes those not conditioned on the axioms.