Beware Richard Carrier: Don’t Fall For His Deceptive Methods

 

Perhaps the best thing that’s ever happened to slippery grifter and unpleasant manipulator Richard Carrier on the Internet is my set of articles in which I try to help him reason better, be more honest, and become a kinder person (see here, here, here and here). But, alas, he got totally triggered and decided to write a horrendous dismissal of my critique of his terrible article on using Aristotle’s existence to undermine Jesus’ existence.

Now, I normally wouldn’t waste this sort of time on discredited people like Carrier – he’s the young earth creationist of the world of mythicist history. But as regulars will know, I do use the exposing of fraudulence and bad reasoning to showcase deeper psychological and philosophical tools at play in how masses of people can be manipulated, in the hope that it will help others see through the cheat. So, blog posts like these can serve as useful tools in aiding readers in critical evaluation and spotting bad arguments, even when they are - and perhaps especially when they are - presented with the outward appearance of sophistication.

Carrier’s modus operandi is a classic case in point – and while he’s not taken seriously by virtually all credible professionals in any of the subjects about which he writes extensively, he does seem to have assembled a small micro-cult following from a few thousand people who he’s duped into thinking he’s someone worth following because he’s onto things that even most experts have missed. Spoiler alert: he’s not; he’s a crank, and, from my personal experience, a deeply unpleasant one at that – which I’m going to expose, in a moment by showing how he manipulates the subject matter to sound like he’s offering sound refutations, but first, on the psychology of how his readers could possibly fall for such a blatantly untrustworthy front man.

I don’t care if Carrier reads this – he is almost certainly never going to change. But I do want his readers to read this, because they deserve better, and should want so much better for themselves, just as I want so much better for them. I’ll use Carrier’s own words from his article criticising me to show you every element of his deception, in the hope that it will help his readers see through him, and in the hope that it will give my readers a lesson more generally in how to see through people like Carrier.

Because the first thing that makes people like Carrier interesting for all the wrong reasons is how it can be the case that his readers can’t see through him, when it should be so much more obvious to them that he’s not to be trusted.

As a case in point, let me state right here that I’m going to submit this on the comments section of his blog post, but I’ll bet you don’t see it appear – because he won’t allow anything in the comments that shows him up at this level.

Before I get to Carrier’s errors of reasoning and mistaken arguments, I’ll first expose the primary psychological cheats he employs. 

1) The dismissive insult
Carrier’s tactic of insulting dismissals, the one he employs most often (“C.S. Lewis may have been the worst philosopher of the twentieth century”, “AI Is garbage“, “Jordan Peterson is a crank”, any expert who disagrees with him is a ‘buffoon’, ‘doofus’, ‘bozo’ etc ), is a deliberate strategy employed by many manipulators of his nature. Because Carrier’s worst fear is being exposed, his ‘go to’ strategy is to try to intimidate readers and critics into thinking disagreement = stupidity. It’s an attempt at psychological dominance and frame control, where his own followers are made to feel judged for even contemplating someone is onto him, and encouraged to dismiss not just all the experts who have exposed his work as wrong and his arguments as sub-standard, but be dissuaded from checking it out for themselves. That is what cult leaders do – it’s as old as the hills.

Of course, it can only work on people either too uniformed or too malleable to spot the cheat. I’ll give you an example which appears in literally the first thing he says in introducing his critique of me; he says “Today I make an example of an internet buffoon”. Now wait. Just stop and ask yourself several things about that. Any of his readers could look at my blog and find exactly who I am. I’m someone with over 1000 blog posts on the Philosophical Muser site to which he linked, and hundreds of articles of mine for other institutions. In that body of work you would find some of the most comprehensive and consistent in depth analyses of most subjects out there – there is no way anyone with half a brain could look at my material and write me off an as ‘Internet buffoon’. Moreover, Carrier knows I’m not an ‘Internet buffoon’, so why did he lie and say I am? In other words, why is the very first thing he said a lie? It’s easy, because unless he lies, he can’t get his readers on side, and by starting with a blatant lie he can lay the foundation down to have them fall for his nonsense reply to my article.

Think about what that means if you’re one of his readers – he just lied to you, knowing that if you searched through my work you’d know he’s lying because you’d know I’m not an ‘Internet buffoon’ – I’m actually much more on top of these subjects than Carrier (which is why he refused to debate me live on video – see below). But it also shows something else telling; it shows that Carrier has contempt for his readers – he doesn’t care that you could find out the truth really easily – he’s just expecting you to swallow it without care because he has so little regard for you. And if you think about it, that’s exactly what you’d expect. He can’t really value his readers beyond your merely as serving as props for his arch manipulations, because he thinks most of you are so gullible you’ll just swallow it up hook, line and sinker. How can he respect people who he knows fall for his cunning deceptions, and thank him for it afterwards?

It reminds me a bit of the Nigerian prince scam, where virtually nobody falls for it, but the scammers still use the Nigerian prince method on the basis that if you're one of the few gullible people left in the world who hasn't been apprised of the Nigeria scam and are likely to fall for it, you will be of those for whom the uniformity of the 'Nigeria' email won't be alarming and prohibitive. With the simplicity of using Nigeria each time, the scammers save having to waste time with all the false positives, and they will continue to catch in their net the few gullible fish still in the sea. Carrier has contempt for his followers because the fact that you’ve become one of his followers has already showed him how gullible you are. As said, I want so much better for you.

By the time he’s moved on to his next line in the article, he’s already told a second big lie: saying my private messages to him reflect “someone painfully immature and emotionally irrational, with no interest in learning or understanding or engaging in any kind of intellectual discussion”. Well, yes, they do – but they reflect those things about Carrier, ironically – and I have screen shots of them to back that up if ever needed. I won’t labour on that point, but suffice to say, Carrier wasn’t willing to take up my offer of a live debate – where he knows there’s nowhere to hide and where the fraudster is forced to think on their feet, and can’t hide behind carefully manipulated, long-winded written texts – he showed a firmer desire to have a written debate, but when I left a voice message to explore this, he said, ‘I don’t listen to voice messages’ (which is ridiculous in this context, but expected from a narcissist like him) – and then when I sent him a written message giving some suggestions about what we could debate, he simply brushed it off with ‘tl;dr’. He’s an absolute joke of a man.

I mentioned that he’s a narcissist – which you can probably sense by his own words on his Facebook profile:

Yes, I'm the real Richard Carrier. Sadly, I'm much too busy to hang out here much. But I have to maintain a FaceBook page to prevent malicious hacks from pretending to be me.

What a scream that is – compounded by the fact that most narcissists have no idea how deep their own narcissism runs. Virtually no one outside his cult knows who Richard Carrier is, yet he has the audacity to assert “Yes, I'm the real Richard Carrier”, who’s “much too busy” to hang out with the likes of you lot, but I’d better have a page to “prevent people from pretending to be me”. Haha, I honestly can’t think of a single scenario in the world where someone would have the even a flicker of inclination to pretend to be Richard Carrier. Hilarious. 

2) Deflection through projection
Now, let me show you another tactic employed my manipulators like Carrier – he chooses terms of insult, like ‘childish’, to shift attention away from his deceptive methods and onto a manufactured image of his critic as the villain. It’s one of the oldest psychological tricks that insecure thinkers like him play. He wants you to think I’m childish so you don’t take my criticisms seriously - in fact, he uses this accusation that I’m childish EIGHTEEN times in the article, no less. Again, it’s another fat lie that shows utter contempt for you, his readers, because you can quite easily find out for yourself that I’m not a childish person. What I do have, as evidenced from highlights of what I sent Carrier in messenger over the past few months, is the measure of him, and a desire that he no longer gets away with his manipulations online. That is the opposite of childishness. Here are some examples of what I sent to him: 

I've looked at some of your writings today, and two of the primary things that stand out are this: 

1) You pretty much always conjure up in your head what you want the conclusion to be, and then use any squalid method possible to argue for that. 

2) Your body of work is similar to that of a young earth creationist, except with the signs reversed. You leave out so much of the vital material, you distort the arguments of your opponents, you argue dishonestly, and your operate on counterfactual peripheries in the hope of forging a niche reputation, where any expert in the field would easily show your ideas to be wrong, and you  produce material that relies on the ignorance and pliability of your audience, where your only recognition comes from people too intellectually lightweight to see through you. 

Your writings don’t come across that way – the most important thing to you is how others perceive you, and your asset or non-assent to truth is driven by how you think you can get more popular and regarded, which means claiming to hold positions that are niche enough to give you a certain type of following. You also claim to care what people who disagree with you think, but that is not backed up by your policy of limiting comments on your page/articles – which is exactly what one would expect of someone about whom the above agenda applies. 

Have you not noticed that you always write off people as cranks, when you're the crank? Have you also noticed that cranks, like YECs, almost never do live debates either, because they don't want to be exposed? 

Even though I was being friendly, the reason you reacted unpleasantly is because all narcissists do this when they are deeply insecure and have been found out by someone who has the measure of them. Biting back aggressively is a classic sign of being found out - it’s what Waugh referred to in one of his letters as “the concealed malice of the underdog”. All that you said in your hostile response is undermined by the fact that you don’t have the courage or intellect to debate me live, where you would have to display your mind, think quickly on your feet, and not hide behind walls of manipulative text within the cosy self-incarceration of your echo chamber.  What you do, sir, is not truthseeking, and nor does it show good character – it’s a cliched Promethean cheat that will only bring you shallow and transitory pleasures – not ultimate joy, fulfilment, contentment or wisdom. When you reach the age of realisation of this, I’ll be happy to have a civilised conversation with you.

The fact that you dismissed all that in a few minutes shows me you can't be taken seriously, and just want to believe what's convenient for you.

And the same with all the attention-seeking about being godless, polyamorous, etc. The big contradiction at the heart of polyamory, I think, is that a person who is not mature and cultivated enough to comprehend how their needs can be fulfilled in the right monogamous relationship with one beloved, will also not be mature and cultivated enough to realise that their needs cannot be fulfilled through multiple relationships or sexual unions, however plentiful the number and varied the experiences. Things can still be much better for you, but not until you change and become wiser. And if those comments induce rage in you, that's because you know how much force it takes to defend a fragile house of cards.

See what I mean? Not childish at all, is it? It’s hard-hitting, sure, but it’s hard-hitting because people like Carrier need to be told that they won’t always get away with things. And there’s nothing in any of my public works that is childish or immature. It’s only what Carrier needs you to think to put the guard up against his being exposed. Carrier, on the other hand, does appear childish in virtually all his conduct – private or public. He is the one who writes off people with crass dismissiveness; peppers his blog posts with puerile Americanisms like ‘doofus’ and bozo’; isn’t even mature enough to sustain a faithful, monogamous relationship, and insults anyone who doesn’t let him get his own way. That is the epitome of childishness. 

The arguments
Let’s look further now at his attempted rebuttals, because they serve as a good lesson in how to ‘sound’ clever and competent when really it’s a litany of further errors of reasoning, bad arguments, and YEC-like distortions of data and fact. His attempted rebuttal fails at every critical level the first article does, but to an even greater extent, because this time he is trying harder to dig himself out of a bigger hole. 

He still rigs his Bayesian model from the outset by inventing reference classes that already assume Jesus is fictional, still assigns precise-looking likelihood ratios that are wholly uncalibrated, empirically ungrounded, and indistinguishable from personal intuition dressed up as mathematics; he still compounds this by multiplying dependent, culturally and textually interconnected evidence streams as if they were probabilistically independent, grotesquely inflating his results in violation of basic Bayesian requirements; he still, in classic Carrier style, responds to criticism by redefining dissent as ignorance of Bayes; and yet again, his ultimate proof of failure is that his method reliably produces fringe conclusions rejected by the historical discipline at large, not because historians fear probability theory, but because his model fundamentally misunderstands how historical evidence, sources, and uncertainty actually work.

To save wasted time going through dozens of his errors, I will just pick the ones I think come across as his best attempts at rebuttals – which are still sub-standard – but they are the ones that I think will most fool his readers, because on the surface they look like the most sophisticated. Again, I’m doing this to expose the subtle art of squalid manipulation, and show how it can easily come across as highly sophisticated, intellectual criticism. We’ll start with his comments first, then my comments underneath.

Richard Carrier 1#: Muser confuses the fact that we have evidence specific for Alexander the Great that keeps his posterior probability high with meaning his prior probability should also be high. It’s the other way around: if all we had were the wild myths of Alexander, his prior and posterior probabilities would be low, and all historians would agree—as they do for Hercules and Osiris, for example. The only reason we conclude Alexander existed is because of the evidence specific to him. Therefore, mathematically, his prior probability, which is the probability prior to considering all that evidence, cannot be affected by that fact. It therefore would not go up. It would stay low. It would remain in fact exactly what it would be if that evidence didn’t exist. That’s literally the point of the prior probability.

My comment: Oh wow, boy is this man slippery in his confusion. Most extreme people online either speak cleverly and competently or they speak foolishly and incompetently – whereas Carrier is one of those rare beasts who tries to perfect the art of sounding clever and competent while misleading you with hollow claims. I believe that’s why he draws in a certain unsuspecting following. Carrier’s claim sounds confident, but it is conceptually mistaken, and the mistake reveals exactly where his Bayesian reasoning departs from how priors actually function in historical inference. It’s basic stuff; a prior is not “what you would believe if you erased all relevant background knowledge and pretended only myths existed.” That is not what a prior is in Bayesian reasoning, and it is certainly not how priors are set in any applied field, including history. A prior is the probability of a hypothesis before considering the specific evidence under adjudication, given all relevant background knowledge. Background knowledge is not “the evidence being tested,” but the wider contextual facts that frame what kinds of hypotheses are plausible in the first place.

Carrier’s hypothetical - “if all we had were the wild myths of Alexander” – is a high school category error. If all we had were myths, then those myths would themselves become part of the evidence under evaluation, and the background knowledge would change radically. In that imaginary world, historians would also lack knowledge of Macedonian kingship, successor states, administrative continuity, geopolitical causation, and the normal sociological patterns of royal propaganda. That is not a legitimate way to define a prior; it is a counterfactual that strips away the very background conditions that inform rational priors.

For Alexander, the prior is higher than for Jesus not because of later literary attestation, but because the background facts already make his non-existence implausible (that is, empires do not appear without founders, successor states do not arise from fictional conquerors, and administrative and political continuity does not emerge from pure myth, that sort of thing). Those facts belong in the prior because they are not the disputed evidence; they are the historical context that constrains what explanations are reasonable. Ignoring them is methodological carelessness.

Moreover, Carrier’s statement that “that’s literally the point of the prior” reverses the concept. The point of a prior is not to simulate epistemic ignorance; it is to encode justified background expectations before updating on contested evidence. The problem is not that Carrier uses priors - obviously; it is that he defines them in a way that excludes precisely the kind of background knowledge historians are obligated to use. If you Google research Carrier’s historical disputes with others, you’ll see this plays out repeatedly in his tactics. And please do the research and see for yourself.

Carrier’s other repeated mistake here is the category error of treating priors as if they must be set in a historical vacuum stripped of all contextual background knowledge except “myth vs non-myth.” That is not how priors work in applied Bayesian reasoning, and it is certainly not how historians reason. A prior is not “what you would think if you pretended no contextual evidence existed at all”; it is what you assign before evaluating the specific evidence under dispute, given all relevant background knowledge. Carrier’s attempt to freeze the prior at a myth-only baseline misunderstands that priors legitimately incorporate historically grounded context, not just genre labels. In short, Alexander’s prior is higher than Jesus’s not because of the later literary evidence, but because the background conditions surrounding Macedonian kingship already make non-existence unlikely.

Richard Carrier 2#: Only when we add that evidence does it go up, but that’s then the posterior (not the prior) probability; and all of the change from the one to the other is in the likelihood ratio, not the prior. Alexander’s prior stays the same as for Jesus, which I set at 1 in 3 in my article on Aristotle, same as my original study (it has since been reduced to 1 in 4, as I there explain, but I set that aside to argue a fortiori). That Muser doesn’t know this shows he has no actual understanding of Bayesian reasoning or mathematics, and thus is not at all qualified to critique any application of it.

My comment: Look how he uses forceful rhetoric to make a statement that laypeople probably wouldn’t spot is just flat out conceptually wrong. Carrier is correct about one narrow point of formalism – that likelihood ratios are what update priors. But he is flatly wrong to insist that Alexander’s prior “stays the same as for Jesus.” That claim only follows if one defines priors in an artificially stripped-down way that excludes historically relevant background knowledge. Bayesian reasoning does not require identical priors across hypotheses; it requires justified priors given what is already known before examining the specific evidence at issue.

The crucial mistake is that Carrier treats the prior as though it must be set before any historically meaningful differentiation is allowed. But priors are not epistemic blank slates. In historical inference, they legitimately encode background asymmetries such as political context, sociological plausibility, institutional continuity, causal footprint, and what have you. Alexander is embedded in a well-understood class of phenomena - Hellenistic kings, imperial conquest, succession crises, and administrative aftermath - that rarely, if ever, arise from fictional individuals. Jesus, by contrast, belongs to a class of itinerant religious preachers in a highly myth-making environment where symbolic invention and theological personification are known mechanisms. These asymmetries belong in the prior, not forcibly suppressed until the likelihood stage. The fact that Jesus is so well attested is what shifts the posterior, but it does not retroactively inflate his prior; the background context keeps his prior lower than Alexander’s, even before examining the evidence.

By insisting that all differentiation must occur through likelihood ratios, Carrier is not following Bayes neutrally; he is imposing a modelling constraint that artificially equalises starting positions in order to push all discrimination into later stages where he can manipulate likelihood assignments. That is not honest work.

Finally, Carrier’s accusation that disagreement here shows “no understanding of mathematics” is equally dishonest. The objection is how he creates the parameter. One can fully understand Bayesian updating and still reject a model that defines priors in a way that deliberately excludes relevant background knowledge. That is methodological disagreement – and the fact that he thinks it’s a mathematical disagreement shows he doesn’t really understand what is being debated here, never mind where his errors lie.

In fact, I’m probably being too charitable still – because this is where Carrier’s Bayesian formalism detaches completely from historical reality. He is correct mathematically that updating happens via likelihood ratios - but he is wrong to insist that priors must therefore be equalised across radically different historical contexts. Bayesian reasoning requires justified priors, not identical priors. Treating Jesus and Alexander as starting with the same 1-in-3 prior simply because both later acquire mythic narratives ignores massive asymmetries in background knowledge: political structures, documentary cultures, social incentives for invention, administrative continuity, and the presence or absence of motive and mechanism for fabrication. Bayesian models that flatten these distinctions are not neutral; they are distorted. Carrier’s accusation that disagreement here shows “no understanding of Bayes” confuses what I would call mastery of a formula with competence in model construction. He can’t see this because he’s not on top of this subject. The sleight of hand trick is in deliberately stripping priors of historically relevant information in order to force all differentiation into the likelihood stage – well, I say ‘sleight of hand trick’, but with Carrier it’s not always evident whether he’s being deceptive or just confused, because he is both so often.

That is not principled Bayesianism; it is model engineering - and I see the same thing with so many other guru figures that the question of honest ignorance or deliberate deception continually looms large. Carrier is more like the equivalent of YEC’s Grady McMurtry than Ken Ham. I’m convinced that Ken Ham is a simpleton as well as dishonest. I’m not sure Grady McMurtry is that simple – but he’s cunningly deceptive, and Carrier strikes me as more like the latter.

Richard Carrier 3#: This is also demonstrated by the fact that he didn’t know my likelihoods for Aristotle not existing already take into account that evidence’s dependency on “a Peripatetic tradition.” He didn’t even know that this is always the case, that it is literally what you are doing when you estimate likelihoods in Bayesian reasoning: you assume the one condition is true (“Aristotle existed”) and then assess how likely the evidence would be dependent on that being the case; then you assume the other condition is true (“it was just a Peripatetic tradition”) and assess how likely the evidence would be dependent on that being the case; and it is the ratio between those two likelihoods that tells you whether that evidence argues for or against either condition (or neither), and the size of that ratio (the difference between those two likelihoods) tells you how weak or strong that evidence is for that conclusion.

My comment: Here Carrier confuses naming dependence with modelling it. While he correctly describes the formal definition of a likelihood ratio, merely imagining an alternative hypothesis (“it was just a Peripatetic tradition”) does not automatically control for evidential dependence. When multiple pieces of evidence arise from the same causal pipeline, they are correlated, and multiplying likelihood ratios still double-counts information unless that correlation is explicitly modelled. Carrier does not do this. He assigns separate likelihood ratios to Aristotle’s writings, testimonies, inscriptions, and later historians, and multiplies them anyway; reducing the numbers does not fix the inflation. Worse, he applies this leniency asymmetrically: dependence is “handled” for Aristotle but used to collapse multiple Jesus traditions into near-total dependence. Again, is it confusion or dishonesty? Either way, it is not principled Bayesian reasoning; it is informal judgment expressed with the appearance of rigour but none of the control. The issue is not whether he conceptually acknowledges dependency, but whether his numerical assignments properly discount correlated evidence streams. In the Aristotle case, nearly all the evidence flows through the same Peripatetic–Hellenistic transmission networks. Treating each as yielding an independent likelihood ratio (even a reduced one) still double-counts shared provenance unless explicitly modelled as conditional on the same causal chain. Carrier never provides such a model; he simply assigns smaller numbers and multiplies anyway. That is not Bayesian rigour, and his readers don’t spot this. Worse, he applies the exact opposite standard to Jesus, collapsing multiple traditions into near-total dependence even when they demonstrably diverge in theology, chronology, and Biblical setting. This asymmetry shows him up for what he is - that he has an agenda, and that his “dependency adjustment” is not principled, it is outcome-driven (which is exactly what my first article expressed too).

Richard Carrier 4#: Every probability in every application of Bayes’ Theorem is a dependent probability. And item by item you can run strict dependency in likelihoods by iterating for each item of evidence in chronological order. But when this has no effect on the outcome, there is no reason to do it, because it requires needlessly complex arithmetic, to no improved result. There is only a dependency on each hypothesis, which is already baked into Bayes’ Theorem. That is precisely the dependency relation we are calculating when we derive the likelihood for each hypothesis: the probability of that evidence dependent on each hypothesis being true—and dependent on all human background knowledge, because each likelihood is P(e|h.b), where the probability of e is dependent on the truth of h and the entire contents of b (such as all inscriptions from Greco-Roman antiquity and their empirically observed frequency of forgery). This is Bayes’ Theorem.

This no dependency on “a Peripatetic tradition” has any effect on this estimate, because the question is whether Aristoxenus is fake or a liar, not where he got his notions from. On Bayesian reasoning we are assuming Aristoxenus got it from just ‘a Paripatetic tradition’ on the contrary hypothesis, and so we are already accounting for its dependency on that tradition. Our likelihood is a dependent probability in that sense, because it has to be: that’s what Bayes’ Theorem is doing. We then put that in ratio to the other hypothesis, where we assume Aristoxenus got it from being an eyewitness partner of Aristotle, and asking how likely the text we have is then. Those two probabilities then sit in a ratio, to give us the weight this evidence has in attesting that Aristotle existed or not.

My comment: Again, there are real, substantive mistakes here, not in the algebra of Bayes’ theorem (though I don’t know if that’s a mere fluke on Carrier’s part), but in how dependence, background knowledge, and evidence aggregation are being handled. At first glance, Carrier doesn’t appear to make any mistakes about Bayes’ theorem in the abstract in this section, but he misapplies it in ways that matter.

Here’s where it goes wrong. He equivocates between “conditional on a hypothesis” and “independent pieces of evidence”. It is true that every likelihood is conditional as per the correct formula, but that does not mean that multiple pieces of evidence are automatically independent given the hypothesis. Conditional dependence between evidence items is a separate issue. Bayes does not magically “bake in” evidential correlations. And when Carrier says “You can ignore dependency if it doesn’t change the outcome” - that is methodologically backwards. Whether dependency changes the outcome is exactly what must be shown, not asserted. You can’t justify skipping dependency modelling by claiming in advance that it won’t matter - especially when the central question is whether the evidence represents multiple independent attestations or repeated recycling of the same source. In Bayesian terms, this is equivalent to assuming conditional independence because it is convenient, not because it has been demonstrated.

Carrier is right that likelihoods are conditioned on background knowledge. But bundling things like inscription frequency, literary survival, institutional transmission, and genre practice into a sloppy group does not solve dependence - it obscures it. Background knowledge constrains plausibility; it does not license treating correlated signals as separate evidential hits. Carrier actually grossly misstates what the dependency objection actually is. The issue is not merely where Aristoxenus got his information, but whether multiple attestations reduce to a small number of causal sources. If they do, then each new item adds far less information than Carrier’s multiplication assumes. Saying “we already assume tradition on the null hypothesis” does not address whether the same tradition is being counted multiple times as if it were independent confirmation. And as I said above, he also applies dependency asymmetrically, especially when Jesus comes into the equation.

Conditioning on a hypothesis is not the same thing as modelling correlation between evidence items, and Bayes’ theorem does not excuse you from that work. Bayes’ theorem does not license multiplying likelihood ratios just because each likelihood is conditioned on the hypothesis. If you could see this, you’d see that Carrier’s “smaller numbers” defense is mathematically irrelevant. Reducing likelihood ratios does not solve dependence. Whether the multiplier is 100:1 or 2:1, multiplying correlated evidence still inflates confidence. Or to put it another way, dependency is structural, not scalar. You fix it by modelling joint likelihoods or collapsing evidence streams - not by eyeballing smaller ratios. If you are unsure who to believe, simply show this blog post to your smartest friend, those who are most apprised of these subjects, and I’ll wager you’ll hear them agree with me. Or do the research yourself – if you do it honestly and pay close attention, you will come to the same conclusion.

You’ll also see that Carrier conflates “acknowledging dependence” with “accounting for it.” Carrier repeatedly says he “assumes tradition” on the null hypothesis and therefore has already handled dependence. But that only specifies a story about causation; it does not mathematically prevent multiple evidence items generated by that same story from being counted repeatedly. Bayesian rigour requires showing how much new information each item contributes given the others. Carrier does not do that. Again, I don’t know if it’s dishonesty or deception, but Carrier aggressively collapses Jesus traditions into near-total dependence while allowing Aristotle’s evidence - much of it flowing through the same educational, textual, and institutional channels I mentioned in my first Blog post - to count as multiple semi-independent hits. That is a discretionary modelling choice that should fool no one.

Carrier seems to understand that all probabilities are conditional - but he is damn wrong to imply that this dissolves evidential correlation. Bayes’ theorem requires you to deal with dependence; it does not excuse you from it. Treating “background knowledge” as a black box does not magically absorb correlated causal structure. Carrier seems to comprehend a bit of Bayes’ formula, but he misuses it by treating correlated historical evidence as quasi-independent without a formal dependency model, then defending the move rhetorically rather than mathematically.

Richard Carrier 5#: This is an equivocation fallacy, where Muser has switched illicitly between two different meanings of “mythologized,” and ignored the actual data-driven process he is incorrectly describing. First “therefore Jesus is mythologized” isn’t a statement that he didn’t exist (because historical people are also mythologized). So “Jesus is mythologised therefore Jesus is mythologized” is not a circular argument but a tautology. It’s as true as “Jesus is a man, therefore Jesus is a man.” That Jesus is heavily (not merely) mythologized (unlike Aristotle) is a fact (not an argument capable of being circular). It is a thoroughly, professionally documented fact. The consequences of that fact are that Jesus starts out as likely to exist as anyone else heavily (not merely) mythologized (unlike Aristotle), which is empirically observed to be no more than 1 in 3 times. Muser is thus just not paying attention. He doesn’t care about what I am actually saying or referencing in my article. He wants to emotionally rewrite reality so that 1 in 3 is “very low” when in fact it’s generously high, that this predetermines the outcome when it routinely doesn’t (and indeed couldn’t), that heavily mythologized heroes exist just as often as mundane people when obviously they don’t, and that an empirically documented frequency is a “circular argument” and “not grounded in history,” all while completely ignoring (and dishonestly failing to inform his readers of) what I actually said, argued, and demonstrated professionally with evidence.

The likelihood of a certain cause (e.g. a mere legendary person, or a historical person, the two hypotheses being predictively compared against the evidence here) derives from the background facts of the frequency of such causes producing such effects. Real revered scientists always produce more or less this kind of evidence (even if medieval selection destroyed most of it). Merely legendary scientists almost never do (the frequency of that in the available massive datasets is not always zero, but is definitely low). Muser does not appear to understand what likelihoods measure, or how they derive from extensive field-generated background evidence of what has typically happened in the relevant period.

My comment: No, no, no. Carrier’s reply dodges the real objection by sloppily redefining it. The charge is not that “mythologised” means non-existent, but that degree of mythologisation is being used as a proxy for existence in a way that quietly bakes the conclusion into the setup. Calling Jesus “heavily mythologised” is not a neutral fact like “Jesus is a man”; it is a contested classification whose boundaries depend on the very historical judgments at issue. Declaring that class to have a fixed empirical base rate (1 in 3) simply shifts the argument along rather than dissolving the circularity. Moreover, Carrier conflates frequency with explanation again: observing that legendary figures “often don’t exist” does not license treating mythic density as an independent causal variable, especially when mythologisation itself can be an effect of later reception rather than evidence about origins. His appeal to “massive datasets” glosses over genre, transmission, selection effects, survivorship bias, and what have you - all of which historians normally weigh qualitatively rather than collapse into a single scalar. Clearly, Carrier has some experience with historical analyses, so quite why he treats a debatable typology as settled data, then treats disagreement with that move as confusion about Bayes rather than a substantive historical critique, is beyond me. Once again, is it confusion or deception? I suppose even being a seasoned studier of history doesn’t automatically mean competence in Bayesian analysis.

Richard Carrier 6#: “My reference classes don’t predetermine the outcome. In that article I am explicit that I use a fortiori priors that are actually very generous to the alternative, estimating the prior odds on Aristotle of being historical way lower than is realistic and for Jesus being way higher than is realistic, to prevent predetermining the outcome. My exact words (which Muser evidently ignored): “In reality the prior for Aristotle would be higher (here I am using the most unfavorable lower bound of the error margin) while for Jesus it would be lower (I am using the most favorable upper bound … ).” Muser never defends any alternative priors nor explains how my selection of priors “predetermines” the outcome either way. I get the impression he doesn’t care if that is even true. He just wants to say this false thing because he is all emotional about it.”

My comment: No, sorry, not good enough again. Carrier’s reply completely misses the point. The problem is not how generous he claims his numerical priors are, but how he defines the reference classes that generate those priors in the first place. Even a “generous” number is still methodologically corrupt if it is derived from a category that already assumes the conclusion. And lowering or raising the numerical values afterward does not fix this circularity; it merely softens a rigged scale. A prior derived from a theory-laden classification is still theory-laden, even if its numerical value is deliberately moderated. Moreover, demanding that critics supply alternative priors is a red herring; if you really want to postulate such an outlandish theory that Jesus didn’t exist, the burden is on you, Carrier, to justify why his reference classes are historically legitimate rather than ad hoc constructs invented for Bayesian theatre. Historians do not infer non-existence from later mythologisation, nor do they treat “mythic” literary development as probabilistic evidence against an underlying person. Carrier’s priors therefore predetermine the outcome, not because the numbers are extreme, but because the conceptual machinery generating them already presupposes Jesus’ improbability and Aristotle’s reality. Calling critics “emotional” is not a rebuttal – he just hates the fact that I can see through his fatal methodological flaw.

Richard Carrier 7#:  “This is embarrassingly confused. Of course my article does give “historically grounded” priors, entirely based on data that has passed peer review multiple times now. It is not circular to observe the fact that “heavily mythologized” persons usually don’t exist. We can count them and develop an actual data-driven frequency of this; and that’s exactly what I did in my original study, with a generous margin of error placing the prior odds on heroes like Jesus existing over a whole third of the entire probability space. The Gregor team’s study improved my results by narrowing that margin, yet ending up within (and thus confirming) my original study’s tolerances, by perfecting its empirical data. Their results now set the frequency of heavily mythologized persons who plausibly existed at 1 in 4, even lower than I assigned in my article on Aristotle, as I demonstrate in OPH.”

My comment: Carrier’s up to his old tricks again because he equivocates between counting myths and establishing historically relevant reference classes. The core error is not whether one can “count” heavily mythologised figures, but whether the set he counts is methodologically comparable to Jesus’ case in the first place. His dataset conflates fundamentally different phenomena: purely literary gods, folkloric heroes, euhemerised deities, composite figures, and later legendary accretions onto real people, then treats them as a single frequency class. That move already smuggles in the conclusion, because Jesus is classified as “heavily mythologised” on the basis of the very sources whose historicity is in question. This is textbook circularity: the evidence under evaluation is used to determine the prior probability governing its own evaluation. No amount of Carrier’s so-called “peer review” rescues that error. Moreover, Carrier repeatedly asserts that mythologised founders “usually don’t exist,” but this claim collapses once the comparison set is restricted to known historical categories: named teachers, executed sect leaders, or founders of movements in the Hellenistic–Roman world. In that properly constrained class, existence is the norm, not the exception - even when extensive myth-making follows. And, I mean, really – desperate appeals to this Gregor team does not save the argument, as refining error margins within a flawed classification scheme does not validate the scheme itself, and more than it does within the circle of young earth creationists. Narrowing the confidence interval around an invalid prior does not make it historically grounded; it merely makes the mistake more precise.

I think that’ll do for now. After you’ve read this, if you’re one of those still convinced by Richard Carrier’s tricks, I encourage you to do what he’d absolutely hate you to do; look behind the stage door; check not just his sources but the sources of his sources, and the sources of those sources in context, and so on, and see what they really amount to. See those sources in their full context, not in the selectively trimmed form he presents. Ask whether the citations actually support the claims he says they do, or whether they are being leaned on, stretched, or quietly repurposed in typical Carrier style. Look closely at what he calls “peer review,” which – like young earth creationism - frequently turns out to be review by sympathetic presses or friendly associates rather than sustained engagement by specialists in the relevant field. Notice how frequently quotation replaces argument, how dissenting scholarship is collapsed into caricature, and how methodological objections are waved away with appeals to authority, metrics, or imagined consensus.

If you don’t want to just take my word for it when it comes or his understanding of probability theory and Bayesian methods, find someone you know who is an expert in the field and ask them to evaluate both sets of arguments for you – I am immensely confident they will tell you the same things I am about Carrier’s lack of competence. The reality is, if you hold him to account rigorously and honestly, the spell breaks - because the scaffolding holding up the Carrier structure turns out to be far more fragile and undependable than he proclaims. The best advice I can give you on Richard Carrier is to give him a wide berth.