Saturday, September 17, 2016

Richard Carrier, Decimated

Richard Carrier is a chowderhead of epic proportions. He has a Ph.D. in Ancient History, and somewhere along the way, one suspects in a required Gen-Ed math class populated with math-phobic Humanities students, he learned some freshman-level probability. He then, to his credit I suppose, parlayed his minimal mathematical knowledge into a cottage industry (well, more like a local Kwik-Mart than an industry) based on convincing the rubes that he could apply Bayes's Theorem to the question of whether Jesus existed. He highlights his ignorance by calculating probabilities to three significant figures. (He has also, along the way, assured us that he knows more about quantum entanglement than the physicists and more biology than the biologists. He is a true super-genius.)

If you are mathematically inclined, "Tim Hendrix" has provided, a rigorous, scholarly smackdown of Richard Carrier.

If you have a Ph.D. in History you should not be permitted to apply Bayes's Theorem or mention Quantum Mechanics. These are micro-aggressions against mathematicians and physicists. We deserve safe spaces impenetrable to the disease of pseudo-intellectualism, of which Richard is a carrier (ba-dum-dum.)

2 comments:

  1. "Dessimated"? Maybe physics professors shouldn't be allowed to write English prose.

    Anyway, what's with the bizarre fonts and missing apostrophes in Tim Hendrix's work? It looks like he doesn't have any idea how to prepare text from latex source.

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  2. Jeffrey,
    Ha! Fair enough. I haven't blogged for so long I forgot that for some reason the title eludes the spell checker.

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