There really isn't any Bayesian "prior" for us. We exist as agents interacting with an environment qua data stream. Every single moment brings new flows of "data" and as such there isnt a sense of having a prior and posterior since this milliseconds prior is last milliseconds posterior.
Not entirely; it's doesn't necessarily involve taking advantage of price discrepancies in different "markets" of the same asset, or contract so to speak in this case, and so it doesn't necessarily lead to "guaranteed" profit in the way that arbitrage does.
It is not a good idea for retail investors to get heavily involved in zero-sum derivatives trading against much more sophisticated algorithmic trading models.
It's just not for you to judge. Those with sophisticated models usually have a lot more capital to manage. Also, it's not a zero sum game because alignment with the underlying's price drives it. Long term share holders are the foundation that makes it not be zero sum. As a retail account grows, its approach too can become slightly sophisticated over time.
It's not a good idea for punters to go to the casino and bet it all on black. Some percentage of the population is always going to be degenerate gamblers. We can try to reduce the harm a bit but ultimately this is just a reality we need to accept.
Being next to the steering wheel is worse. If the human needs to be in the car, then he should be behind the wheel. Putting him next to the wheel is categorically stupid and only serves as theater for fools.
I remember being a young boy spending summers with my grandmother who lived on Church Street. I used to spend whole days in those book shops, good to know they are still a major part of the neighborhood.
> Even back when every household received a morning paper I cannot fathom how a single article could command such a high pay.
He wrote for the New Yorker, which is a magazine rather than a newspaper. The number of long-form literary nonfiction pieces that the New Yorker runs every year is drastically fewer than the number of news articles produced to fill a daily newspaper in just a couple weeks.
I'd recommend looking into adding a speculative final journey he might have taken to Spain. He mentions plans to go there in Romans, and other sources like 1 Clement and Jerome suggest he actually went there. The city of Tarragona has a tradition that he visited, as a speculative destination to map.
It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.
I'm not really a believer or practicer anymore, but as someone who spent substantial time reading scripture when I was, I've thought a lot about what happens to Christianity if you discard the writings of Paul. If the namesake of Christianity satisfies the claims of the believers, that should be sufficient. Unfortunately, I believe that without Paul's writings, as well as the body of knowledge contained in extra-scriptural writings (commentary through history, catechisms, doctrine passed down by your local church, etc) Christianity pretty much falls apart.
Christianity as an imperial-aligned religion doesn't happen sure, but I'm not sure it falls apart. Jesuism or "The Way," looks a lot more like the Anabaptist traditions, Quakers, Liberation Theology, Christian Anarchism, and secular "Jesus as moral exemplar" movements.
As to the degree that these are falling apart is debatable. They certainly don't have the strong central hierarchy and universalism that Catholic and Protestant sects have, but they seem to endure.
Paul's letters are the earliest evidence of Christianity we have. The gospels weren't written until much later. It wouldn't surprise me if Paul's theology influenced what was written in the gospels.
> I've thought a lot about what happens to Christianity if you discard the writings of Paul.
Without Paul, Christianity reverts to being a variety of Judaism whose leader from the hinterlands got it right about what really mattered in life, as had his predecessors [0]. But he fatally misjudged the big city's religious oligarchs — vassals to their ruthless Roman occupiers — when he relentlessly attacked them and their cozy little setup; at their behest, he was executed by the Roman overlords.
Some [1] of the leader's later followers — his posse, if you will — imagined they'd seen him. But the leader's wealthy and/or well-connected followers are strangely absent from the narrative. Perhaps they had more information about what had really happened [2].
The early postmortem appearance tales eventually mutated into a legend of a warrior-king, raised from the dead — who would return Real Soon Now, to usher in God's reign and establish Israel's rightful place in Creation [3].
Over decades, the tales percolated into Mediterranean Graeco-Roman culture — eventually mutating further still into a tale of a divine being [4] (perhaps hybridized with that culture's myths?).
> It is very strange the amount of theology that comes solely from Paul's idiosyncratic writings, given that he neither met the prophet in question (Jesus), nor was taught by any of his students (apostles), nor even got along particularly well with any of his students.
It's interesting that every point of this narrative conflicts with the canonical accounts (even excluding the Pauline corpus for this purpose), in which Paul did encounter Jesus, and did at least spend time with (we aren't explicitly told it was spent in study, but presumably it was not exclusively in silent meditation) with disciples of Jesus between the encounter and conversion experience and the start of his ministry, and he got along as well with the other apostles as the other apostles they did with each other.
I chose the words carefully for that reason. The prophet of the nascent religion was a human being who was born, lived and died as a human being. Paul did not encounter this man. In his story, he encounters a divine being, and receives a private revelation (gospel) and mission that is distinct from the revelation and mission that the prophet in question gave as a human to his chosen students (apostles).
Paul is, in this terminology, also a prophet. He explicitly says the revelation he tells is not of human origin, and so not passed down to him through e.g. the ministry of one of the students (apostles) of the prophet in question.
It strikes me as unusual to have so much of the theology coming from someone who simply claims private revelation but is not the prophet in question and when the prophet explicitly chose disciples and set a ministry for them.
Not sure why you refer to the person who visited Paul on the Damascus Road with the term “divine being“ when this divine being as you put it specifically identifies himself as Jesus Christ, whom Paul was persecuting. And there’s further dialogue where Jesus communicates additional information to Paul as to the things he must suffer for Christ’s sake. He should also point out that Paul went over Peter and many of the other disciples to accepting him and his recount of the Damascus Road experience, despite the fact that he persecuted the church and was sending people to jail just prior to this encounte. I would take Paul at his word as faithfully recounted by Luke more than I would take your words as once so far removed, and obviously skeptical of the scriptures themselves. The entire New Testament and Christ life focuses on faith, which is supported by actual historical miracles and healings not to mention in Christ resurrection itself. That’s the whole issue, faith and belief versus skepticism and unbelief. It’s the grand drama that’s the whole point of both Old Testament and New Testament, that sprouts in the garden of Eden, where the serpent casted out on God‘s veracity when describing the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. of course there will be people like you that argue on the side of skepticism and unbelief and that’s been true throughout history so nothing new here
I called him a divine being to describe the kind of experience it was. There was a historical human form of Jesus that the chosen apostles interacted with. In Paul's testimony he encounters Jesus who is not take the form of a historical human anymore and therefore the type of religious experience this is, is one with the divine. I am not making a Christological argument on the full nature of Jesus.
I am Christian btw, but I support bringing historical and documentary rigor to theology. I also haven't actually doubted anything, at least not of Christ. I've just characterized Paul's gospel and mission as coming from a private and separate revelation, unlike the gospels and missions that the original apostles received.
The point that I made based on that is that it is strange that a lot of the theology of Christianity as it develops centuries later is derived more from the exceptional and privately delivered gospel of Paul, rather than from the gospels of the apostles of Jesus when he also held a historical human form.
I think there is also an obvious scholarly reason for this that doesn't even require belief, which is that Paul's writings are the closest documents we have to the time of historical Jesus. However, that also gives reason for us to be cautious in hanging major theological positions on specific sections in Paul that seem absent from or in tension with the synoptic gospels.
So I’m wondering, do you the epistles Paul wrote as less authoritative and scriptural then the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John? I just trying to understand the distinctions you are trying to communicate in your responses. Thank you for sharing and I don’t want to continue to make assumptions like I did in my first comment that miss the mark
He was also a Roman citizen, so he could pull some privileges for free rides like getting to Rome through exercising his right to appeal directly to the Emperor
His main privilege was that petty local rulers were more reluctant to persecute him than they would a non-citizen.
Seneca’s brother, most well known as the recipient of Seneca’s letters, was one such judge who dismissed the charges against him when he found out that he was a citizen.
Exactly. There is no standard, humans will adapt and find how to use AI as a tool, and the bar will never and should never be fixed.
The beauty of Turing's Test (which he strangely seemed to misunderstand) is that it is almost impossible to pass.
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