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

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

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 - […]

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 […]
2016-11-28

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 33)

So the diversity of the individuals involved in Christ's resurrection testimonies already make a high degree of interdependence unlikely. One could hardly find a less likely group of people to enter into a world-spanning conspiracy. You would expect disparate parts of such a group to be constantly at odds with each other, destroying the conspiracy almost […]
2016-11-21

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 32)

So, could the resurrection testimonies really have a near-total dependency among them? Could they have been generated by a conspiracy of some sort? There are a multitude of reasons to think they were not. First, there is the story of apostle Paul - one of the named witnesses in 1 Corinthians 15, and someone who […]

Bayesian evaluation for the likelihood of Christ's resurrection (Part 31)

Let us examine this general class of theories, that postulate a near-total interdependence in the evidence against them. What kind of theories are they? What are their properties? Is it fair to characterize them as "crackpot" theories? Now, note that such theories requires a conspiracy of some kind, almost by definition. Near-total interdependence means that […]

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

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 (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 […]
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