I will be in South Carolina this February 21st (Sunday) speaking on the subject of applying Bayesian reasoning to the question whether someone existed…you know, someone like, say, Jesus. I’ll be speaking at 4pm in Gage Hall (4 Archdale Street, Charleston, SC). Open to the public. I will be selling and signing copies of my books (including for the first time a new printing of Proving History that is physically smaller and lighter, but still a hardback). We will all be having dinner after at Tasty Tai and Sushi.
My talk this time is “Applying Bayes’ Theorem to the Historicity of Jesus and Its Lessons for Critical Thought.” For the first time I will discuss both Proving History and On the Historicity of Jesus and what I have “learned from interacting with critics over adapting Bayes’ Theorem to the task of analyzing the evidence for Jesus, and how such lessons become a window to understanding Bayesian reasoning and its application to all areas of critical thinking.”
More details here.
Be careful you don’t trip over all those presidential candidates!
I’ll give you a bare bones mundane example to make my point:
Mary tells me she does not love me. I have just made a case to my friends in a venue where Mary is not present whereby I refute her assertion with my own evidence that is irrefutable by my own definition. Mary actually loves me; she just hasn’t noticed. (And by the way I love her). A friend jumps up and says, “for obvious reasons, we’ll have to hear Mary say she loves you or does not love you before we can decide the matter.”
Tucker says he does not agree with you. You say that Tucker agrees with you on the basis of self-referential claims you make about self-validated references to your own work. Logically you have entered an arena of debate between TWO SEPARATE PEOPLE over stated differences. The various audiences that “read” the debate will form divergent consensuses. Neither you nor Dr. Tucker can unilaterally proclaim himself the winner and demand unanimity of consensus Certainly, the next step toward approaching credibility is to have Dr. Tucker “show up” even in email form to answer your argument that you and he are in agreement about the “prescriptive, descriptive, explicative, and exemplary” application of Bayesian methodology in PH and OHJ.
This isn’t a valid analogy. The matter in dispute is not a fact hidden in someone’s brain. It’s an objective fact that you can verify yourself with your own eyes. It’s more like Tucker saying there is no road sign at the corner, and I am saying go look, and you will see yourself that there is in fact a road sign there. That’s all you need do: go look at the street corner. Is there a road sign there? Done.
Tucker is saying at several points that one or another x is not in PH. In every case either it is not supposed to be in PH, it’s in OHJ, or it is in fact in PH. In every case, you yourself can go verify this. You can walk to the street corner and see if the road sign is there. You can open either book and confirm what I am saying is there is what Tucker is saying should be there.
In the first case, when it’s in OHJ: e.g. PH isn’t about deciding whether Jesus existed; the competing hypotheses for that are developed and compared in OHJ. So you can go and look at OHJ and see whether I am in fact doing what Tucker says should be done as far as constructing and comparing hypotheses against the evidence. And the fact that PH was not to include that is explicitly stated in the Preface of PH, as I quoted. You can go look at PH and confirm that that statement of purpose is there. Done.
In the second case, when it’s in PH: e.g. Tucker says I don’t discuss the alternative literary causes of evidence in the Gospels, I say I do, and I give page numbers where I do (where I repeatedly talk about other ways content gets in the Gospels other than it being caused by something a historical Jesus actually said or did). So you can go to PH and look at those pages and see for yourself whether I discuss other causal hypotheses for how certain content got into the Gospels other than something a historical Jesus actually said or did. Street corner. Is the road sign there? Done.
Even if you are visually impaired, there is an audio version of both books. You can listen to them with your list in mind of the things Tucker says should be in them, and hear for yourself if they are in them.
Hello,
I have a couple of questions for you. I have read some recent critiques of you by Dr. Luke Barnes and by Tim Hendrix. Both Barnes and Hendrix rather convincingly demonstrate that you are in over your head when it comes to the application of Hayes Theorem. It seems that you are unclear of some of the basic concepts of Bayesian statistics. I also read the review of PH by Tucker, which you linked to in your last blog post. Tucker also points out some confusion of Bayesian principles on your part, where you confuse likelihoods and prior probabilities. While you did respond to this criticism in your last blog post, in my opinion your response was completely inadequate, and the mistake that Tucker pointed out is part of a pattern of confusion about Bayesian statistics.
Dr. Carrier, I am a longtime fan of your historical and philosophical work. Hiwever, when it comes to applying Bayesian statistics, it is clear that you do not know what you are doing. Unless you have a qualified expert assisting ypu, you really shouldn’t be giving any presentations on the use of Bayes Theorem. When you speak on something that is clearly outside of your area of expertise, it damages the credibility of your other work. This talk might also damage the credibility of Lowcountry Secular Humanists. As atheists, we should not select unqualified speakers just because they conform to our pre-existing views. That is what Christian Apologist hacks do. We should be better than that.
You can verify this yourself: Are the confusions Tucker claims actually in Proving History? If you find an example, that you can quote from that book, where I actually engage any such confusion, email me. Good luck with that. But do try, if it really concerns you they might be there. I’ve already given page numbers and quotations to help you.
The Barnes and Hendrix exchange is solely about an esoteric issue of meta-epistemology: where “the existence of observers” goes in a conditional probability of how we got here. That actually isn’t really about Bayes’ Theorem. It’s about the logical entailments between the existence of observations and the existence of observers, and the problem of ascertaining the relative probability of lucky gods vs. lucky universes, which Bayes’ Theorem itself can’t help with.
I suggest you become more familiar with these issues. Then if you see an error, let me know where it is. Otherwise, attend to what is actually being debated.
I’m very suspicious. Compare this comment to a very similar one that happened a little while ago:
http://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/9581#comment-1058761
Also notice that both of the names can be googled and turn up as fictional characters:
Lamar Latrell
Harold Wormser
So ya, that looks like a troll or whatever.
Slightly less strongly, I suspect einniv as well. This was because I had an email exchange with einniv (a redacted version of it is here), then read your back and forth in the comment section with Barnes, and the same kinds of bizarre tactics seem to have been used. Also, einniv referred me to some writer (Tim Hendrix) who was supposedly an atheist, and said maybe I’d trust an atheist more. This seems similar to the use of the “fan” persona of these two troll comments, and the “we” stuff that “Harold Wormser” is pushing.
I don’t know what to make of that. But thanks for the link collection and analysis. Collating the data.
Actually I meant to say that I was only slightly suspicious of einniv, somehow I wrote that wrong.
I’m even less suspicious about einniv now because I just read over that convo again with fresh eyes and it really doesn’t look like it jumps from topic to topic as much as I previously thought, now that I see the connections between some of the topics.
Also, I submitted my previous comment before I noticed that both of those names are not only fictional characters, but both are from “Revenge of the Nerds”. Though that doesn’t make much of a difference, I might be jumping to conclusions by thinking the features I noted mean they are dishonest.
Just in time for the election thingamajig there? Co-incidence?
(It is South Carolina after Iowa and New Hampshire for some weird reason that puts those United States first for weird reasons, yeah?)
Any thoughts on that? Election & Sth Carolina round thereof esp, please?
No thoughts going in. Curious to see what comes out.
And yes. Just a coincidence. 🙂