Read any good books lately? Rate them here

[Alex K]

Yeah, this Bayes theorem shit is probably interesting to a math geek but it is in essence a comparison of probabilities.  That is fine but then Carrier frequently seems totally arbitrary (or worse ) in the assignment of numerical values to those probabilities.  Now for the "or worse" part.  He almost always tends to over-value religious positions I suppose in the interest of "fairness."  It is not necessary.  The story is bullshit and he knows it from the beginning and all of this alleged mathematical proof is a distraction from the narrative.

The fact that jesus is nothing special within the literature of the time is sufficient.

I'm halfway through Proving History and I thought it was very thought provoking so far. Then again, I would probably qualify as a math geek. Initially I also had serious problems with the act of assigning probabilities to all these historical things which can be educated guesses at best, most of the time. But there are two arguments that convinced me that there may be something to his approach.

First of all, as he himself says, when one does history the old-fashioned way, one also weighs things against one another, implicitly giving them a numerical weight even if one doesn't state it. So all he does, he says, is doing the same thing that is already done anyways, but more transparently and rigorously.

The second point was that one doesn't always have to put fixed numbers - one can instead use upper or lower bounds for probabilities and then obtain bounds for the probability of the conclusion.  He calls it arguing a forteriori or some such. This to me seems to be a good way to obtain more reliable conclusions. One can say, ok, I don't know exactly how probable it is that the lights went out in galilee for a few hours and no historian wrote it down... but let's give it a "less than one in a hundred" to be on the conservative side. And so on. If you then disagree with my conclusion you can point exactly to my choices of numbers and state which ones you would choose differently to get a different outcome. Based on this transparency in assumptions, a much more meaningful discussion can be had.

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Young Adult

Twilight, Harry Potter, Divergent, Ender's Game, basically think of all the recent movie franchises based on books and they're probably adaptations of young adult books.

Honestly, it's hard to find movies that aren't adapted from books. It's not just the latest crop of YA titles.

Battleship was adapted from a board game. And what a glorious movie it was.