f7d9395c_atings_and_reviews___Gwern_net__Review
[Title] Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus [Author] Richard Carrier [Rating] ★★★★ [Year] 2012 [Read] 2012/10/31 [Review] 
Overall, it’s an interesting book which I regard as basically correct and a fruitful approach for future research, and Richard Carrier is a good guy whose work should be supported. On the other hand, so far it’s not quite as awesome as I was hoping it’d be when I was writing an essay on identifying the author of the Death Note movie script with Bayesian reasoning recently - I think Luke Muehlhauser was right in his LessWrong review that Carrier does his case a disservice by trying to expound Bayesian ideas in a New Testament context where, half the point of Bayesian ideas is to point out how useless the evidence is! That’s… not a good way to either demonstrate Bayes is good in history nor to convince people of his overarching claims like ‘all correct historical inference is Bayesian inference’. The way to introduce a new paradigm is to start with its successes, where Bayesian methods led to a correct prediction or retrodiction of an issue where decisive evidence surfaced while before the issue was settled, conventional methods were confused, wrong, or underconfident; and then argue that its practical success combined with your philosophical arguments about Bayesian reasoning being the only correct reasoning is a convincing synthesis, maybe then work out verdicts/predictions/retrodictions on a non-controversial area so the experts can see how they like the conclusions, and only then extend it to highly controversial and difficult (scarce or low-quality evidence) material. I understand how he would come to write it that way since that’s what he was paid to do and Biblical material has become his specialty but I can still regret that the outcome wasn’t as good as it could’ve been.
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