NaClhv

Theology, philosophy, math, science, and random other things
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  
2016-12-19
Importance: 

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 36)

We've decided on a power law as the general form of the "skeptic's distribution". The details of the distribution near zero will not particularly matter. We're more concerned about how rapidly it decays at very large values. This allows us quite a bit of leeway in choosing the specific form of the power law distribution, […]
2016-12-12
Importance: 

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 35)

Recall that we're constructing a "skeptic's distribution" - the probability distribution of generating a resurrection report with a certain level of evidence. We will construct it from historical, empirical data. This allows us to bypass the mess of trying to compute everything from first principles, and ensures that the this is the correct distribution - […]
2016-12-05
Importance: 

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 34)

Can we quantitatively tackle things like conspiracy theories? What do we do about the interdependency of evidence? One can already imagine the objections to any such attempt. Every assumption would be questioned, and every ridiculous possibility brought up demanding a full numerical treatment. Even if a traditional conspiracy were to be fully debunked in a […]
2016-10-31
Importance: 

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 30)

Let us recall our purpose in collecting these non-Christian stories about a "resurrection": we wanted to verify our Bayes' factor for the evidence of Christ's resurrection. My claim is that it's at least 1e54. The first part of our plan was to find the non-Christian resurrection story with the most evidence behind it. If we […]
2016-10-24
Importance: 

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 29)

So, let us summarized these non-Christian accounts of a resurrection. For each supposedly "resurrected" person, the following table shows the level of evidence associated with their resurrection account, expressed as a fraction of the evidence we have for Christ's resurrection: Name of the person The level of evidence Apollonius of Tyana 1/30th Zalmoxis 1/60th Aristeas 1/24th Mithra […]

Questions and answers: my career change to data science

I've been working as a data scientist for some time now. This is a change for me. My background is in physics, and my previous work was mostly in education, teaching in the STEM fields. So this is an exciting period in my life. Career changes often are, and data science in particular is an […]

Questions and answers: my career change to data science (Part 2)

(continued from the previous post) 4) What are the best and worst parts of the job? My favorite part of the job is probably something that I've mentioned above - the idea that I'm sharpening my data interpretation skills, that my job is basically to think soundly about data. It's also great to see my […]

Questions and answers: my career change to data science (Part 1)

I've been working as a data scientist for some time now. My background is in physics, and my previous work was mostly in education, teaching in the STEM fields. This is an exciting period in my life. Career changes often are, and data science in particular has been called "the sexiest job of the 21st […]
2016-09-26
Importance: 

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 28)

(Continued from the previous post) Miscellaneous thoughts Here's a few more assorted thoughts: I still think that you're too afraid of large odds. For example, my gut feeling is that 99.99% is far too small a limit on how certain we can be in history. I mean, we can make meaningful, almost empirical statements about […]
2016-09-19
Importance: 

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 27)

(Continued from the previous post) Planning out the stages of the whole argument So, all that gives us that Bayes' factor of 1e54. Now, as I've said I'm okay with its large magnitude, under the specification that this is for a certain model evaluated under some well-justified degree of independence. Given its large value, Jesus […]
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