Finally making sense of Donald Trump

Analysts have been struggling to make sense of Trump’s erratic presidency. Is he a complete incompetent, or a brilliant strategist? The evidence for both cases is compelling. (more…)

Bayes’ Theorem, error and bias

What is the effect of using Bayes’ Theorem to combine multiple pieces of evidence, given the presence of error and bias in estimating the probabilities of evidence? Will the error grow or decrease as we add more evidence? (more…)

Review: On the Historicity of Jesus

As a child, a teacher made me agree that even if all the Bible stories were fiction, there must still have been a real Jesus that the legend was built around.  This conclusion was unsatisfactory, because how can we say that a man existed, if there is nothing specific we can know about him?

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Is Jesus a Rank-Raglan hero?

Richard Carrier argues in his book On the Historicity of Jesus that Jesus fits exceptionally well into the Rank-Raglan hero classification. He claims no known historical figures do, making Jesus unlikely to have existed. I will examine these claims in detail. (more…)

Debunking ‘impossible’ interest theories

A lot of people, myself included, have become convinced that the financial sector has grown way too big. A popular theory that is making the rounds on the internet and in ‘alternative’ literature is that there is a fundamental mathematical problem involving debt and interest. (more…)