That’s basically what I go on to say.

Is it? Can we still be astonished that the fear of death drives people into intellectual dishonesty? Isn’t it clear by now that if a person must believe they have an immortal soul, designed by a god, for a cosmically significant purpose, that this person must destroy all ideas that are a threat?

Yeah. His behavior is that of a tinfoil hatter, like countless I’ve encountered in my decades of experience. They will make contradictory statements like “probability theory gets us weird results” and then (when their math is showed to be wrong) “we don’t need probability theory.” And they will respond to being caught in a mistake by publishing giant wordwalls of insults and slanders and false or even illogical boasts of their superiority and their critics’ incompetence and stupidity, while only digging the hole of evidence of their own incompetence and stupidity further.

The best response is to just tick the box “this guy’s too crazy to bother listening to anymore” and go find someone better to read.

Seems for the most part William is trying to attack you for not supposedly not understanding stuff like how Bayesian reasoning “isn’t really needed” and that it “stands or falls based on its inputs.”

And that while both of you have peer reviewed work yours is more negative due to the reviewers noticing more flaws

Is there anything in there worth responding to?

As in, does he correct anything I actually said in my article here?

At a glance, all he seems to do is complain that I caught him. He doesn’t actually correct anything I caught him doing.

But if you see anything more substantive there, let me know.

Otherwise, my original article already refutes his rebuttal.

https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/25457/

People who object to applying scientific tools and methods to any field are displaying a struggle with Cognitive Dissonance; they invariably try to alleviate their CD by saying that the tool is useless because some people used it incorrectly.

“Using Bayesian statistics in history would be a sound practice if only there were any objective probabilities that could be calculated.” — That’s false. Indeed it misunderstands what probability theory and epistemology are or how they work. And I refute this statement in detail in Proving History, with cited scholarship and abundant examples and explications. So you should read that to catch up. Meanwhile, you can survey yet more the examples of it being false, starting here (which in turn references numerous other examples).

These (including Proving History) also all show you are incorrect to assume we need ever to “give an example of a historical fact that is true with a certain probability, but for which the probability does not depend on hundreds of other things.” That’s also not how probability reasoning or epistemology works. If it did, humans would never have existed: we’d have been unable to form any reliable beliefs about anything and have died out in consequence. Several examples in PH show how and why we do not need to take into account any such things (we “could,” but there is no logical, historical, or scientific need to).

As to the weird fringe theories you cite, I am aware of no peer reviewed example of any valid Bayesian argument supporting them. Citing bogus uses of a method, does not argue against the method. We’ve been over this already.

The conclusion is simple: calculating the (logarithm of the) probability that the association between ‘Cam’ and ‘Skamandrios’ is not coincidental is so extremely hard to do that nobody can even provide a meaningful estimate. And the reason why they are so hard to estimate is that they are all interdependent. The probability of Cam deriving from Skamandrios depends on the probabilities of the core tenets of Wilkens’ theory, but also on very many things Wilkens never mentions. Yet also the dependence on the core tenets of a theory is very variable. Some probabilities might indeed be high, but have another declaration than the ones that Wilkens proposes. Most probabilities are undoubtedly much lower than what Wilkens would propose. So my objection is this: can you actually give an example of a historical fact that is true with a certain probability, but for which the probability does not depend on hundreds of other things?