For me, the thing that kills the theory for me is the idea that, in the middle of western Europe being about as politically stable and integrated as modern Afghanistan, all the warlords pillaging the country to kill each other were able to not only unanimously agree on "let's change the year to a nice round number", but were also able to coordinate this without leaving any historical records of it.

Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will confess before their death. Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally before you can even execute on it.

Now think of how many people had to cooperate to change something as simple and fundamental as the passage of recorded history. Hell, forget the fact that these were all angry, violent warlords; just think of how many scribes, monks, and bureaucrats would all have to remember to write 1000 instead of 736 whenever they wrote a date. It only takes one slip-up to reveal the fraud to archaeologists in the far future, even if they all agreed that they wanted to live in the nice round-number millennium. And nobody would be trying to protect against that because nobody would be thinking, "how do we hide this from 21st century archaeologists trying to discover our time crimes?"

>I know the resurrection is a fact, and Watergate proved it to me. How? Because 12 men testified they had seen Jesus raised from the dead, then they proclaimed that truth for 40 years, never once denying it. Every one was beaten, tortured, stoned and put in prison. They would not have endured that if it weren't true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn't keep a lie for three weeks. You're telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.

- Charles Colson, advisor to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal

Hard to tell if you or Charles Colson is/was being serious, but for the benefit of the many, many people who actually do believe this: there is not a single account of an apostle dying for their beliefs that was written by someone who 1) was contemporaneous with the apostles and 2) put their name to the account. All of the supposed first-hand accounts are anonymous.

There's a fringe hypothesis that historical Jesus (the human person behind the legends) survived crucifixion, perhaps aided by secretly-sympathetic guards, and was in a near-coma for 3 days in the tomb but then returned to alertness and was helped out of the tomb (perhaps by sympathetic guards).

The Roman official who ordered Jesus' execution didn't really want him dead, so perhaps he gave off-the-books instructions to the guards that "if this person were to miraculously survive being crucified, and escaped his tomb in a few days, well there's nothing you could have done to stop a miracle. His tomb that of course is temperate and happens to have water supplies inside. There's nothing you could have done. Wink wink."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilate%27s_court

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swoon_hypothesis#Supporting_ar...

"It was uncommon for a crucified healthy adult to die in the time described by the Gospels; the Gospel of Mark reports that Jesus was crucified at nine in the morning and died at three in the afternoon, or six hours after the crucifixion. ... The average time of suffering before death by crucifixion is claimed by some to have been observed to be 2–4 days. ... Modern scholarship has also cast some doubt on the generally agreed depiction of Jesus being nailed to a cross, as opposed to the more common method of having a victim's hands and feet being tied to a cross."

If dying normally took 2-4 days, it's possible that a sympathetic guard could have declared him dead after only 6 hours on the cross (maybe after he first fell unconscious) and then transferred him to the tomb in the hopes that he might recover in the remaining 1.5-3.5 days, perhaps moistening his lips in the process.

If Jesus were tied to the cross rather than nailed to it, there's really not any plausible thing that could have killed him in just 6 hours of mild to moderate blood loss + heat exhaustion. It's much more plausible that he would have fallen unconscious while maintaining a heartbeat and weak breathing.

I used to be Christian and am now more of an agnostic who wants to believe in a benevolent God, and it would be really cool if something like this did happen. Maybe Jesus was just a person but a good one who tried to do good and got lucky through some series of events like this.

I recently unfortunately had a loved one who went through the dying process in hospice care, and it was horrifying to watch, but it took multiple days, about 5 days, and 6 hours just isn't plausible. 6 hours on the cross + a recovery from near-death three days later in a cool tomb makes a lot of sense if someone gave him water on the way to the tomb. Or maybe the tomb had a hidden supply of water in it, like a puddle big enough to drink.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

But it is important to point out that while there is no conclusive evidence to say whether Jesus was nailed or tied to the cross, nails were used for crucifixions by the Romans in Jesus time. It's possible that the Roman official who ordered Jesus crucifixion wanted to be merciful so he ordered the guards to hammer bigger holes into the hands or wrists of Jesus to increase the rate of blood loss so that he would die quicker. I guess my point is that the evidence is inconclusive so there are many ways you can fill in the gaps. There's even some who claim that Jesus and Paul were the same person. Sounds sketchy to me, but there is probably no way to disprove them.

I don't know my Christian scripture, but didn't Jesus also get stabbed with a spear by a Roman soldier at some point around the crucifixion? That could certainly explain an early death. I might be horribly wrong though.

> who wants to believe in a benevolent God

What would be a benevolent God, in the context of our history and present? (wars, torture, floods, famine, ...)

(I am myself an atheist, curious of what drives people to believe in a deity)

I'm agnostic but have come to believe in Buddhist beliefs here.

Life is suffering. You can literally only live by causing suffering in other living plants/animals. Therefore to live a happy life, you must come to terms with this and attempt to cause as little unnecessary suffering as possible.

Therefore if there is a God, they are either an impersonal one (think mother nature instead of the Christian god), or their understanding/views are so removed from our own that we have completely misunderstood and guidance they have tried to give us.

I lean toward the first view. Anything capable of creating the universe might be interested in us, but I highly doubt we’re their only (or even primary) interest.

Some possibilities include:

Maybe God is not omniscient or thinks in such non-human terms that human suffering didn't catch God's attention. E.g. maybe God operates primarily at the scale of quarks, and God wanted to create a universe full of quarks doing interesting things, and humans are an emergent behavior that God isn't aware of.

Maybe God is near-omniscient but is not omnipotent. E.g. maybe God had the power to create the universe from nothing, but can't affect what goes on in the universe. So maybe God has a hand on the universal/multiversal "off switch" and could choose to end all of everything if suffering outweighs joy, but maybe God is powerless to affect reality beyond this binary effect of enabling or disabling existence.

A third possibility similar to the second one is that maybe God sees all possible timelines, and cannot change events within a timeline, but can adjust the "volume knob" for the intensity of qualia in each timeline. In applied moral philosophy this volume knob is sometimes called "moral weight".

A fourth possibility, and a different way that God might be constrained in powers, is that perhaps God sacrificed their life in order to give life to the multiverse. You could imagine this as God wrestling against the nothingness of non-existence that came before God, and that the only way to win was to die in some way, so that God no longer exists but once did.

We currently know so little about physics that we don't know if we live in a singleton universe, an infinite multiverse (like in the many-worlds hypothesis), or a finite multiverse (like the Marvel movies, where you can assign a finite number to each universe because there are finitely many). And we don't know if we live in a block universe (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternalism_(philosophy_of_time... ) or if there is something else (e.g. a combination of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_presentism and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_return ).

Perhaps in the future we can use reasoning to determine the most likely answers to metaphysical questions, and if God does exist, is benevolent, and is still alive, maybe we can even find a way to communicate with God, perhaps through particle accelerators or whatever other equipment could affect the phenomena which are easiest for God to notice. I figure it doesn't hurt for us to think about what our civilization would ask God if given one chance to do so. If God really does control the "volume knob", we have a lot to be grateful for, such as the spontaneous arising of RNA life through excellent luck in prehistory. More recently, we barely survived the Cold War. I study Cold War history a lot, and many of those of us who do so estimate our odds of having survived up until now as being 1 chance in 3.

My fringe hypothesis is even wilder:

Jesus told his believers to eat his flesh and blood to get eternal life (John 6:53–57)

Someone took it literally and opened the grave, and ate the body

This is how the body disappeared suddenly and the grave was open. Others seeing this thought this was a miracle. Meaning Jesus came back to life, opened the grave and left

Whoever was involved had a good reason to keep that secret

And that's why Jim Jones was truly God. Man got 900 people to literally drink the kool-aid.

> kool-aid.

You say literally, but the Kraft Heinz company would like you to know that it definitely also might have been Flavor Aid.

Makes sense. Socialists ain't got enough money for koolaid.

...and Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange, and Mark Klein, and Leslie Cauley, and Russ Tice, and Clare Short, and[0][1]...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_surveillance_disclosure...

Are you ironically linking government websites for satire purposes?

Or what?

You can’t possibly take Wikipedia seriously as a source of information on controversial figures. That would be the least charitable interpretation and violate HN rules

Nah, it leaks. Besides the big leaks like Chelsea Manning, there are constant small leaks: things like anonymous sources to the papers, and via Congressmembers (who collectively leak like a sieve). A lot of that is intentional.

What’s the leak ratio? How many people go to work for the NSA/FBI/ATF every day? What percentage of them leak?

Why leak it more than once, though? At this point, the facts are already well-established. It's just that we as a society apparently just don't care enough to hold our rulers accountable (with torches and pitchforks if necessary).

>people already know

Do they, though? Most people don’t know shit outside their preferred news channel.

Zoomers are faithfully recreating the boomer flaw via moderation so they have a nicely curated injection of sludge

I think the perspective the people involved have matters a lot. If you just view what you're doing as your normal job, you don't even need to lie about what's going on, you just don't even talk about it because it's a mundane detail. When you conspire to do something everyone involved knows is illegal and wrong, your guilt weighs more heavily and you start slipping.

This. You clock in and clock out doing evil shit all day.

Your mortgage backed by Americorp indirectly backed by the fed depends on you being a good goy and so what? You keep doing it to pay the bills.

Fyi, someone actually built a formal model to demonstrate that large conspiracies are probabilistically doomed to get exposed:

https://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2016/0127/Can-mathematics-...

However, the model makes a few simplifying assumptions, eg a single leak is sufficient to expose the conspiracy, and I think it also doesn't cover mortality. A conspiracy that wasn't exposed up until the death of all in the know would probably be considered as succesful by the model. I think it's fair to assume that the probability of getting exposed at least significantly drops at that point.

This is specifically the mathematical model I'm referencing, I should probably save this so I remember what to cite next time.

While there probably are conspiracies that would take multiple leaks to fully expose, one thing to note is that leaks tend to be correlated with one another. Newsworthy reporting on conspiracy leaks inspires copycat leaks[0] - either to get one's fifteen minutes of fame or to jump ship before the prosecutions come about.

A conspiracy that is "successful" in the sense that it was taken to the grave can still get exposed, though. Sure, the members of the conspiracy can't leak it themselves, but they also can no longer destroy any physical evidence or information they left behind. So that evidence could itself be considered a conspirator that cannot die and will eventually leak.

[0] This also applies to school shootings.

Doesn’t this assume the existence of a strong fourth estate and/or an executive branch, able and willing to investigate leaks?

There are ways to at least partially inoculate against leaks; regulatory capture and elimination of accountability, quid pro quo journalism, “fact checking”-driven censorship, or just simply positioning yourself politically so that the responsible entities don’t want to investigate.

Anything left over can be written off as a smear job, a conspiracy theory, etc.

> Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally

There's still a credibility issue. There are a lot of people who claim to have worked for the government and have direct knowledge of extraterrestrials. They mostly come across as crazy, but this might also be what a conspiracy looks like. Even when people expose it, they just look crazy and are easily dismissed.

> Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will confess before their death. Bring in hundreds or thousands and the conspiracy will be blown open accidentally before you can even execute on it.

That's what they want you think!

If someone has the means to compel the silence of millions then we're not talking about a conspiracy anymore. We're talking about the SCP Foundation. The conspiracy will grow to encompass the entire planet, after which there will be no one to hide the conspiracy from[0].

[0] https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/everyone-knows

> Here's the thing about conspiracies: they have a shelf life. The amount of time you can keep a conspiracy secret is bounded by the number of conspirators, how well you can get them to shut up, and how long it has been since the conspiracy occurred. You can take a secret only you know to your grave, but work in a group of ten and someone will confess before their death.

As you effectively prove, any long running conspiracy must have tools to discredit defectors. I’m willing to bet dollars to donuts that if, hypothetically, some WEF flunky went on twitter and started posting about a global depopulation conspiracy, that the prestige media would either ignore or deny (“debunk”) it and any alternative sources would be smeared and delegitimized somehow.

One possible tool for discrediting tales of one’s real conspiracy would be spreading stories of various fake conspiracies and then lumping them all together as nonsense.

This only works as long as the defectors have no evidence, right? That seems like it would be harder to guarantee.

Or no ability to speak -- like Neo.

So long as the defectors have no credible evidence. Evidence and people both are observably fairly easily discredited for the majority of the population.

Isn’t that a good thing? I can deliver a bunch of non-credible evidence for basically anything I make up. It’s unfortunate if a person is blowing a whistle on something real but can’t actually prove it, but the alternative is just believing whatever fits your biases. You end up with those alternative news sites where everyone just believes everything they hear and there are vast interconnected conspiracies running everything.

Non-credible is totally subjective. You are always taking someones word unless you check for yourself. Who do you believe? It's not the alternative it's the way things are.

Evidence to the contrary doesn't discredit anything in the minds of most people... They are more likely to simply attack the person putting forth the evidence for causing them cognitive dissonance migraines.

Credibility of evidence is not totally subjective. I (and you, and anyone) can personally prove in a variety of ways that the earth is not flat, but still many people believe there is a conspiracy that the earth is round.

Of course they all tell each other that all facts are subjective anyway and wouldn’t it be cool and interesting if you were in on a big secret and everyone else except you and your new friends were sheep.. oh and by the way did you know that it’s actually lizard people who started the idea that the earth was round? Doesn’t that feel right and would explain why your life hasn’t turned out the way you wanted? And so on.

In this case I’m explicitly talking about making up non-credible evidence. If everything is subjective then whatever I made up is as good as anything else, I just need to tune it to your biases to make it feel as truthy as possible. But if you believe me then you’ll start to have problems when you need things to actually be true (like running a space program or military for example).

Muddy the waters... then you label anyone who notices as a water purist, and tell the dumb ones that the water purists are the ones who muddied the waters.

The problem with conspiracy theories is that they tend to be less useful as a way to sus out actual abuses of power and more useful as an ink blot test. People see what they want to see, because humans are creatures of fiction that can't stand the thought of living in an objective reality where coincidences are just coincidences and the most boring explanation is probably true.

The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard capitalist outfit. Their more out-there views are not particularly divorced from the rentier capitalism of the New Gilded Age. To be unambiguous about it, that means a heady mix of international megacorporations, uncensored corporate speech[0], copyright maximalism, and the Brussels Effect[1]. The Occam's Razor explanation for the WEF is that greedy corporations that want to maximize profits are going to be greedy and profit-maximizing - in other words, it's the "capitalist agenda".

But if you have particular kinds of brainworms[2], you're going to ignore the greed that you don't want to talk about and start making up reasons for their actions wholly unrelated to what they actually think. For example, if you think white people are being "replaced", then you'll look past the obvious explanation and into the fringes of the ink blots, and come back thinking that the WEF was created by the powerless to oppress the powerful with... power they don't have.

In cases where conspiracies have actually tried to discredit defectors, it usually fails. In fact, it fails so hard that it becomes a meme, like "Russia denies" or "I did not have sexual relations[3] with that woman". Most actual conspiracies are just not that well thought out[4] enough for this to work, while the people writing the conspiracy theories are actually overthinking things.

What actually kills conspiracy theories is conflicting information - i.e. the conspiracy theory not actually lining up with reality. There will always be people who still buy it, though, because conspiracy theories that are not true always substitute veracity with narrative salience. In fact, sometimes being widely known to be false benefits the conspiracy theory, because now you can work the debunking of obvious lies into your conspiracy narrative and make it more salient than ever. And there's no actual conspiracy on the debunking side, either. You are not being smeared by the media because they're all in on trying to hide the truth - remember, coordination leaves evidence. You are being smeared by the media because you are on the side of narrative fiction.

[0] Sometimes complained about under the banner of "money is not speech"

[1] The process by which treaties agreed to by rich countries tie the hands of non-party countries by way of tolerance.

[2] Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism

[3] it's only sex if the balls are touching - Bill Clinton

[4] Reason being that being in a position of power gives you symptoms of brain damage. In order to implement a successful conspiracy you need power, and that power will blunt your reasoning over time.

> humans are creatures of fiction that can't stand the thought of living in an objective reality where coincidences are just coincidences and the most boring explanation is probably true.

Alternately, they can’t stand living in an objective reality where powerful people are systematically up to bad things and they’re helpless to do anything about it. Given the response to the comment you’re replying to, even the possibility that there might be any kind of conspiracies is displeasing to many.

As for the most boring explanation probably being true, well that would be a terrible heuristic to use for any of the hard sciences. I don’t see why it would be the case for the considerably more complex and chaotic social sciences.

> The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard capitalist outfit.

That’s certainly what the prestige media will tell you! In any event I just tossed it out there as an example.

> Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism

You may want to pick another example, given that there were in fact communist sympathizers in the State Department at the time.

Sympathisers aren't implicitly traitors, and the idea that there was going to be one global communism, with power centred in Moscow was thoroughly discredited by history since.

You're giving a wonderful example of the phenomenon I'm discussing. You learned, probably in grade school, about McCarthyism and whatnot and now you're ironclad convinced the whole thing was a paranoid fantasy conspiracy theory or if there is any truth to it at all that it was insignificant. Meanwhile, there are a large number of known communist traitors and spies from the era[1] and probably many more that weren't discovered. It's been the better part of three decades since the Venona Papers were declassified. This is ironclad history[2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eastern_Bloc_agents_in...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_the_Venon...

> One possible tool for discrediting tales of one’s real conspiracy would be spreading stories of various fake conspiracies and then lumping them all together as nonsense.

To which you replied with a strawman:

> For example, if you think white people are being "replaced", then you'll look past the obvious explanation and into the fringes of the ink blots, and come back thinking that the WEF was created by the powerless to oppress the powerful with... power they don't have.

…in a very detailed comment trying to portray the WEF as not a cabal subverting democracy with oligarchical acts.

I think it’s interesting that your comment can be understood as what the GP was discussing in action.

> …in a very detailed comment trying to portray the WEF as not a cabal subverting democracy with oligarchical acts.

I'm not sure how you got that from GP's comment, but they were saying the exact opposite about the WEF: it is just a way for greedy corporations to maximize profit by co-opting governments and international institutions to do their bidding. That's what they meant by "corporate free speech" and the Brussels effect.

> it is just a way for greedy corporations to maximize profit by co-opting governments and international institutions to do their bidding

Except we know that’s not true, eg, in the case of pushing DIE which has catastrophically reduced profits in Disney, WarnerMedia, and Netflix. And more broadly ESG scores, which have led to the ridiculous virtue signaling we see.

The “boring” explanation is that it’s a cabal by the people involved to implement their vision — not that there’s some magic corporation that’s always maximizing its value through its drone agents. That’s just as much a fiction as anything else.

To portray the WEF as “those greedy corporations!” minimizes the nature of what people there are doing by creating fictional entities who are the real actors.

Rich people pushing a liberal agenda are still rich people. The "capitalist agenda" I mentioned in my prior comment still applies and supersedes the virtue signaling.

For example, Bill Gates, the EU, and the MPAA all stepped in to tell President Biden to get lost when he proposed suspending COVID-19 vaccine patents. They worked tirelessly to water down and chip away at every WHO vaccine program that might have meant them either having to negotiate a rate or not enforce patents in certain countries. If this was just about pushing a liberal or left-ish agenda at the expense of profits, they would have just licensed the patents at zero cost to anyone in Africa with an mRNA printer[0], and then lobby the government to suspend patent protection so the laggards couldn't get a competitive advantage with a proprietary vaccine.

Things like ESG scores are offered because people don't want to invest in oil companies and investment brokers can make more money if they offer that option to people who would otherwise not have invested in the stock market. This is free-market capitalism working "as intended" - people see the long-term risks of bad environmental management and divest themselves from it.

I have no idea what "DIE" means or how it has catastrophically hurt Disney profits.

[0] (aggressively pirated grunge metal plays in the background)

You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag.

Downloading COVID-19 vaccines is stealing.

> Rich people pushing a liberal agenda are still rich people. The "capitalist agenda" I mentioned in my prior comment still applies and supersedes the virtue signaling.

This is a belief in magical entities the same as you were denouncing.

> For example, Bill Gates, the EU, and the MPAA all stepped in to tell President Biden to get lost when he proposed suspending COVID-19 vaccine patents.

Yes — which is why it’s important to understand the particular benefits to Bill Gates, and other individuals involved.

> Things like ESG scores are offered because people don't want to invest in oil companies and investment brokers can make more money if they offer that option to people who would otherwise not have invested in the stock market.

Yes — that’s the pretense. But not the practice which a) uses captive funds to push agendas of insiders and b) is focused on pushing the destructive social agendas of insiders ahead of actual metrics.

> This is free-market capitalism working "as intended" - people see the long-term risks of bad environmental management and divest themselves from it.

Except that it’s not:

It’s insiders using grandma’s retirement money to push their personal political agendas, even when that loses money for grandma.

Again, look at media companies for that collapse — WarnerMedia, Netflix, Disney, etc.

> Again, look at media companies for that collapse — WarnerMedia, Netflix, Disney, etc.

What collapse? These are e some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world. Netflix stock went down because the market foolishly expected that all of the subscribers Netflix gained in two years of extremely reduced social lives would not only stay subscribed, but were representative of how fast people would keep subscribing. When this obvious idiocy turned out to be false, the stock plummeted back to more realistic levels it had pre-pandemic.

By the way, I also tried to find out what you meant by DIE, and came up empty handed (though I'm sure searching for WEF DIE has put me on since watch lists somewhere).

This. But even what the article agrees with is wrong: "It only works if you focus solely on western Europe, where the decline of Rome left a nasty gap in the records." -- There is not really a gap. We have fewer records, but still covering a lot. They may not be autographs, but that is not very different from the situation with antiquity. And when it comes to supporting chronology, numismatics is probably the best evidence. It would be impossible for a forger of history to bury hundreds of thousands of matching coins all over Europe.

Absence of evidence actually is (weak) evidence of absence. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/mnS2WYLCGJP2kQkRn/absence-of...

There is no absence of evidence, not by a long shot. There are fewer written records in the traditional sense (books, letters, legal documents concerning things like transfer of property) but there is no shortage of inscriptions on various sorts of things, for example -- not to mention every other kind of historical evidence and, of course, the fact that some aspects of early medieval Western chronology can be cross-checked against contemporary sources in North Africa and the Middle East. We call it "the Dark Age" by comparison with, say, Late Antiquity, but even so, we have vastly more evidence about what happened in this age in Western Europe than we have about what happened in various ages of Antiquity all over the place, and no one thins those were made up.

As for the article you linked to, that kind of probabilistic approach sort of works for recent events. Applying it to things that happened a long time ago, where the presence or absence of evidence is correlated with a whole lot of other things, from court historians making shit up to cows tripping up over a lamp light and burning whole cities, is a pretty futile exercise.

> There are fewer written records in the traditional sense

But still more written than you could ever hope to read in your lifetime.

You're ignoring the method by which these things are dated. First, if a date was written on the page (extremely rare), it may well have been after the date change happened. The vast majority of writings from the time are dated to known events, like eclipses, or by reference to other known things ("20 years ago, when Joe was born" and then finding Joe's birth records).

If calendars really did advance 300 years, we are living past the advance. That means that when we see a writing reference an eclipse that we know happened in what we call 900, it doesn't actually tell us anything about the calendar having moved or not. It only tells us that something was observed 1122 years ago. That could be 900 years after 0AD, or it could be 600.

Actually, almost every instance of dating anything back then depends upon few relative date calculations which are "known". The eclipse happened 1000 years ago, so that is year 1022, and this writing referencing it is from 1022, and so this scholar writing a generation later is from 1082. This inscribed rock was found under 1100 years of dust, so the people living here were from 922, and their language existed at that time, and all records we find from this civilization are now known to be from the early 900s. Now we can claim to have evidence that there was thriving commerce in the 900s with hundreds of written records about it, so of course the dates weren't changed.

If you dig into the records people cite as evidence against the phantom time hypothesis, the vast majority of them (literally every one that I've seen) is using indirect dating in this way, which doesn't mean anything.

> (weak)

It's actually as strong as your expectation of the evidence being there. If you are absolute sure of the evidence, look, and don't find anything, this is very strong evidence of the absence.

But well, on this case the absence is quite expected too.

Is there such thing as weak evidence?

Evidence that irrefutably proves something is very strong evidence.

Evidence that kind of points towards something, but inconclusively, is weak evidence.

For example, if 100 witnesses saw the accused murder the victim, and they're all credible, and they tell corroborating stories, that's pretty strong evidence.

If 1 person thinks he saw the accused murder the victim, from the other side of a car park, but he has bad eyesight anyway and it was dark and raining, then that's weak evidence. It's not nothing, it's still evidence, but it is weak.

This seems to be equivalent to asking if there is any such thing as strength of evidence at all, and so yes, of course. The evidence that 100mg of cyanide will kill you is very strong, the evidence that seed oils cause inflammation is weak, even though there's a lot of it.

If you're bayesian.

Wouldn't that mean the quantity vs quality of conspiracies though?

Sort of.. at least there is in the scientific tradition.

Your theory predicting reality is generally weak evidence. It opens your theory to invalidation if the prediction fails, but does not rule out hypothetical alternative theories that also make the same prediction.

Theories aren't evidence at all, what could you mean by this?

A particular theory is a glue potentially connecting some number of observations. The observations + theory are evidence.

The reason that a messy pool of blood on the floor is evidence of violence is the theory that the blood came out of a person in a messy way.

I have always found the history around the Holy Roman Emperor interesting, with prince electors : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Roman_Emperor as a basis of continuing the Roman Empire in the west.

As it is I think we know little what happened to aristocratic families at the end of the Empire as well.

I rather like Gibbon's argument that the Ottoman empire was effectively the continuation of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman empire - by that line of thinking the ultimate surviving descendant of the Roman Empire fought in the First World War.

It's also fun to note that one of the first leaders of the Russian empire married one of the last Byzantine princesses - thus taking the title of Caesar (Tsar).

Yeah Moscow sometimes referred to as Third Rome by people who view it as the continuation. The Holy Roman Empire would have of course differed as the Kaiser (also Caesar derived) similarly counted himself as the continuation of the Roman Empire.

And since when Tsar is Byzantine title? :)))

Tsar is a contraction of Caesar as pronounced in Slavic languages. The corresponding Byzantine title was Basileus, and while the word itself is unrelated, the title correspondence was very well established at the time (much like the use of "emperor" for Chinese and Japanese rulers, even though the titles in those languages are not etymologically related, either).

> I rather like Gibbon's argument that the Ottoman empire was effectively the continuation of the Byzantine/Eastern Roman empire - by that line of thinking the ultimate surviving descendant of the Roman Empire fought in the First World War.

The Ottomans themselves thought of and described themselves this way.

We know so little that there is no verified unbroken lineage between anybody from Antiquity to the Middle Ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descent_from_antiquity

And what we do know, doesn't necessarily mean what those searching for descent from antiquity think it means. All tracing of such descent assumes that pregnancies involved known paternity, whereas we know that in general, there is a lot of error in recorded paternities (one of the more interesting side effects of DNA sequencing, both in consumer offerings, and in medical and official use, is demonstration that far more children are not the children of their named or assumed father than was suspected). Add to that, the fact that you could potentially have, say, Charlemagne in your direct line of descent, and still have none of his genetic material in your makeup. This is so because at the remove of Charlemagne, you're 48, give or take a few, generations, removed from the trillions of leaves on your family tree, but you get roughly 1/2^-n of your DNA from an nth generation progenitor and have only 2^36th or so base pairs of DNA in your entire genome. So, Charlemagne can be your umpty-great grandfather, and yet you in be in no genetic sense, a descendent of Charlemagne.

In other words, past a dozen or so generations, any data we've got on bloodlines has a lousy signal to noise ratio for proving direct descent.

> far more children are not the children of their named or assumed father than was suspected

The origin of this factoid is one British study about paternity tests for fathers on some street. However, the methodology of that study was deeply flawed and the fathers self-selected (i.e. they already suspected they weren't the biological fathers). Later studies has put the rate of "false fatherhoods" at about 1%. https://www.iflscience.com/false-paternity-isnt-actually-wid...

I've never heard of the British study you propose being the source of my observation. But it doesn't matter. If we're talking about deep ancestry, like say tracing your lineage back to Charlemagne (which seems to be a popular anchor), you're talking about 40 to 50 "fathers" between the good old King and a modern descendent. If there is a 1% probability in each generation that the paternity recorded was wrong, then you're looking at at least a 1 in 3 chance that your paternity chain is broken. If the rate is even as high as 2%, it's 1 in 3 that the chain isn't broken. One break, of course, and your claim of descent is invalid.

Matrilineal or patrilineal lines give you much stronger signals than that, though, thanks to mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA respectively.

I don't see how. Sure, if you had mitochondrial DNA from your long-dead male ancestors, you could suss out your true patrilineal line of descent, but it's extremely unlikely that such data is available. You might be able to get it by inference by analyzing the fanned-out descendents of a relatively recent putative paternal ancestor - back 8 or maybe ten generations, but even that's unusual. And, if you're targeting a specific ancestor, it requires an unbroken line of paternal descent - as soon as your path to, say, Henry VIII goes through a female descendent, at any generation, you've lost the Y chromosome relationship. Same argument applies with the sex roles reversed for females and mitchondrial inheritance. At ten generations back, you've got 1024 grandmother leaves on your tree. Only one of them is your mother's mother's .. mother's mother. At 20 generations (say, 500 years, so the actual age of Henry VIII), you've got a million grandmother or grandfather leaves on your tree, and only one is purely matrilineal, and one purely patrilineal. (That doesn't mean, of course, that you've got a million distinct grand^20 fathers - it'll be way less than that, because the some men will appear on many different leaves, and the same for mothers. But the odds that the path you claim to Henry VII is purely maternal or purely paternal are still very small.

Sure, but unbroken patrilineal or matrilineal lines of descent are rather improbable over such long times - any family that had only sons or only daughters breaks the line, and that's not particularly uncommon. Add some infidelity into the mix and it becomes even harder to believe.

Non-genetic descent is actually much stronger than that even.

When genes are sexually recombined, they don't recombine randomly per-base pair, they're cut and recombined in big strips. The chromosomes actually only 'snip' in a small number of places.

This means that after a relatively small number of generations, it's quite easy to have no genes at all from one of your ancestors.

I don't recall the exact numbers but it's something like 8-12 generations where you start having serious numbers of ancestors with no genetic connection.

Of course. Absent recombination, you'd start having ancestors dropping out after only 5 generations. With recombination, it's a few more. I didn't make the argument that way, because when I have in the past, I get a bunch of "yeah, but ..." rebuttal. In addition to the complicated nature of recombination, there is the additional complication that when you get back 6 to 8 or more generations, the same progenitors generally start appearing in multiple branches of your family tree - sometimes in many, many branches. But it is nevertheless the most correct. We all probably have great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents from whom we have no genetic inheritance at all. Add a couple more greats, and it's a near certainty.

These were totally different systems between the Roman era (or eras) and the catholic Western European system of nobility.

Even at the peak of the empire, it wasn’t like driving around in a modern nation state, there were all sorts of associated kingdoms and tribes within the borders you see in history books. In many ways the empire was like a franchise with local governors wielding varying power and independence.

As the empire declined, association with that state became less relevant, so they dropped the pageantry of being the great grandson of Marcus Whomeveritus. As the petty kings and nobility started consolidating and emerging as “legitimate” in a system, the “mists of antiquity” served to launder that your background descended from an usurper governor, tax farmer, or barbarian warlord.

Meanwhile there's people alive today who claim main line descent from Confucius who lived in the 5th century BC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kung_Tsui-chang

China also has a continuous literary tradition between that time and now, so the claims are plausible.

I'm actually more impressed that the old Chinese imperial families are still around:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhao

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Zhu

In what I would think of as the "standard model" of history, one of the highest priorities for a new king is eliminating everyone who might theoretically be related to the old king.

It does seem to be a Chinese tradition (and I believe in quite a few other places) to pacify the old king and grant them a comfortable enough retirement, as they’ve already lost power. It’s probably less confrontational and somewhat satisfies all sides in the long run. Examples would be some kings during the Three Kingdom period, who all got some sort of honorary title in the conqueror’s kingdom.

Yeah.. even the last Chinese emperor wasn't executed, despite the endless civil war and his cooperation with Japanese.

On the other hand, membership in that family is unlikely to be something you want widely advertised. I believe most of them changed their name.

We lost a lot of historical records between late antiquity and the early middle ages. Most devastating for Italy was probably the Gothic War.

Then the records that were in Constantinople were also lost, not only by the fall of Constantinople itself but also by the sacking of it by Christian crusaders.

Lots of records that could have shown such a descent are lost.

Now Confucius was an important historical figure.

It's not surprising that he is one of the few cases where an uninterrupted descent could be true. If Jesus or Caesar had a family line run into modern times or if the Papacy was hereditary, we might have such a line for Western civilization as well.

China also has kept a fairly robust set of records compared to the rest of the world.

Would be hard for Jesus, given he didn't exist.

That is an extremely fringe belief, in disagreement with most scholars of antiquity.

I don't think it is a fringe belief. I have not heard of such a consensus among "most scholars of antiquity." What are you basing that on? A discussion I heard in the past few years which mentions that is an open question is here: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-evidence-f...

The Wikipedia article [0] has a lot of quotes pointing to this. Even modern supporters of the theory, like Robert M. Price, recognize it as a fringe position within academia.

Of course, it is an open question in some sense, as the evidence is nowhere near as powerful as, say, Newton's laws of motion, or the existence of Julius Caesar.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus#CITEREF...

True, but that's because history as a discipline has incredibly low standard of evidence. They collectively decided that since reliable evidence is often very difficult to produce, they will settle for what they can get. A lot of antique or even medieval historical figures are known from a single sentence in some chronicle written 100 years after their death.

Even the most ardent Christian biblical scholars admit the overwhelming majority of writings claimed to be 1st century are much later forgeries. They have picked out a few scraps they have not been able to prove were forged, and based everything on those.

But the most favored bit of positive evidence is a single paragraph that everybody agrees was badly doctored up. They have "reconstructed" what they think the original must have actually said. But the text before and after it would flow neatly one to the next without it.

Next best is a line in Paul where he mentions somebody is Jesus's brother.

Both pieces of evidence are from Josephus' Antiquities. Not the best evidence but also not the worst.

That would make it unknowable whether he existed, it would not mean we have reason to believe he didn't.

This is not like physics where it's natural to assume something didn't exist if the proof for its existence is not strong enough.

Only because a lot of people want to believe.

We are all confident Adam, Noah, and Moses were made up, with none of the proof positive that you are demanding for this one case.

Adam, Noah and Moses were only attested and believed to exist by groups living in the Kingdom of Judah.

For Moses, people have looked a lot for any kind of evidence that there was some significant Jewish presence in Egypt, or Egyptian migration to the area of Israel, and nothing of the kind has been found, either in Egyptian documents or in archaeological evidence - which is actually evidence of absence when expecting a significant population to have migrated that way. Further accounts from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, such as the battle of Jericho, have also been somewhat conclusively debunked (the city of Jericho hadn't existed, at least not worth walls, for a few hundred years before the time of the conquest is supposed to have taken place).

Similarly, we have looked long and hard for evidence of a massive flood that could have lent some credence to the story of Noah, and nothing of any significant magnitude was found for that time - and here, we know for sure that a flood would have left significant geological evidence, so we know the flood can't have existed.

Adam has so little information associated with him that it's hard to even define what it would have meant for him to exist. We do know for sure, based on DNA evidence, that there is no single father + mother pair from which all humans living today have sprung, definitely not anyone living anywhere near close to the Jewish account of Adam.

In contrast, the idea of a founder of the Christian sect, one who was killed under Pontius Pilate around the year 33, has no major evidence against it, and is a somewhat plausible account of how the Christian sect could have come to be. There are no sources asserting a different origin, and there are no sources that contradict the possibility that Pontius Pilate and the Jewish authorities would have punished someone behaving like Jesus did. So, the neutral position is to say that he may or may not have existed, we don't know.

If you further believe the biblical or non-biblical sources attesting to his existence, even if you think they are weak, you can even say that it's more likely that he existed than that he didn't.

No one who lived then and wrote anything about Jesus, including the (unknown) authors of the Gospels, ever claimed to have met Him.

We can be confident Paul existed, or anyway somebody we know of as Paul, who wrote his Letters. Likewise Homer, the Iliad. Tacitus, Pliny, Horace, Plato, Euripides. But there is nothing traceable to any Jesus. You certainly can choose to believe He existed, but objectively, the evidence is too thin to support it.

Funny thing about Noah's flood. The water is all still there. We call it the sea. Sea level rose 120 meters in the past 20,000 years, up until 8000 years ago. Many millions of square miles of what was rich river bottom land is now sea floor. People whose family had lived there for tens of thousands of years had to keep moving inland (where other people already lived!) as the sea swallowed their ancestral homes. For 12000 years. It must have made an impression.

But the gradient is positive.

What's that supposed to mean?

In 1900, no historians thought Jesus was like Moses, Abraham, and Adam, made up from whole cloth. In 2000, some did. Today, more.

The scenario as I understand it is that Paul's writing came first. But to get a congregation to pay attention they found they had to invent a corporeal Jesus to have said their things, then apostles to have heard them, then a bio for where and when, and finally gospels to tell it in.

For those who object that such a thing wasn't done, consider Moses and, really, all of Genesis and Exodus. Iliad. Thor'n'Loki. It was not just done, but positively demanded.

Genealogists have worked out most American Presidents 800 years or so. A couple interesting facts include (1) about everyone one of them is at least 10th cousin to every other one and (2) a large fraction descend from King John of England. Probability suggests that after a millennium that that someone becomes a super-ancestor, i.e. everyone is descended from them, or no one is descended from them. Very little middle ground. (A lot of northwest European Americans probably have the same statistics as Presidents.)

What does “main line” mean in this context?

I would assume father > son descent, so oldest son is usually the main inheritor.

Depth First Search for heirs.

That sounds like an elevator pitch.

Japanese emperors back to 600 BCE.

> being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13

Doesn't that account for 3 mystery days per year? The Gregorian calendar was introduced 1582. That's not even 500 years. Makes 500y * 3d/y = 1500d is about 4.5 years.

How does this explain "about 300 missing years"?

The Julian calendar is wrong by ~1 day/128 years compared to the true solar year, not 1 day per year. So 3 days => ~390 years.

And the computation goes like this:

1. Julian calendar was created in ~45 CE.

2. Gregorian calendar was created in ~1582 CE.

3. To bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, you would have needed to subtract (1582-45) / 128 ~= 13 days. However, they only subtracted 10 days.

Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582.

Correct conclusion: they were not trying to bring Gregorian time back in line with Julian time, but with a later time, that of the Nicean Council in ~325 CE.

> Wrong conclusion: they were actually in the year 1285, not 1582.

I read the whole article and I did not understand this part describing the premise of the conspiracy.

Is the suggestion of the conspiracy that they essentially made a transposition error between 1285 and 1582 while fixing a relatively minor skew of a few days?

No, the conspiracy suggests that the leaders of the major powers in Europe in the year 700-and-something conspired to simply start calling it the year 1000 for the prestige value, without recording this decision anywhere. Essentially it's like we all agreed tomorrow to start calling next year 2300 instead of 2023 (but theoretically slightly more plausible in a time before centralized calendars and computing).

Later historians simply took the official date for granted - so the people in Pope Gregory's time believed they were living in the year 1582, but, unbenknownst to them, only 1285 years had passed since the year 1CE. The real date was reflected in their astronomical calculations, leading to the 10 day correction instead of a 13-day one.

Of course, this is all absurd for all the reasons listed in the article, and others.

It's not that absurd to believe mistakes could have been made there. The BC/AD system was invented centuries after Christ and only started to become actually known around the 730s:

The addition of the B.C. component happened two centuries after Dionysius, when the Venerable Bede of Northumbria published his "Ecclesiastical History of the English People" in 731, wrote Antonia Gransden, who was a reader in history at the University of Nottingham, in her book "Historical Writing in England: c. 500 to c. 1307" (Routledge, 1997). The work brought the A.D. system to the attention of more people and expanded it to include years before A.D. 1. Prior years were numbered to count backward to indicate the number of years an event had occurred "before Christ" or "B.C.

The B.C./A.D. system became more popular in the ninth century after Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne adopted the system for dating acts of government throughout Europe."

https://www.livescience.com/45510-anno-domini.html

Before the adoption of this system dating was rather chaotic, with dates usually being recorded as "year X of the reign of so-and-so". To line dates up and synchronize them on a timeline was difficult, and synchronization of European, Islamic, Greek and Roman history wasn't even attempted until the 16th century (Scaliger's De Emendatione Temporum).

Mistakes, yes. 300 years? No. 300 years, including the Carolingian Dynasty, the expansion of Islam (i.e. The Battle of Tours), the Norse expansion (eventually leading to the domination of Europe by a bunch of guys named Norman)? Nope, no so much. And that's before you start looking at Islamic, Indian, and Asian data.

And then there's radiometric dating and dendrochronology, which are chaotic in their own right, but 300 years? Nah.

Weirdly, I was just reading Lynn White's Medieval technology and social change (1966), discussing the introduction of the stirrup and the heavy plow (as opposed to the scratch plow), both of which happened in this period. There's little in the way of good dates, but some very big changes such as the move from individual family subsistence farms to large, ridge-and-furrow strips and Charles Martel's redistribution of church lands to his followers, introducing true heavy cavalry and the feudal system. (Note: may be a bit out of date with modern research.)

This comment has me wondering about how software could help sort through timelines like this. Given a corpus of historical periodicals referencing individuals and entities, sort them in order by date. Surely this has been / is being done? I searched for "automated historiography" but didn't find anything resembling that.

In some ways, it might be easier to pull off with centralized digital calendars, as long as the powers-that-be have access to commonly-used NTP servers. (Which could certainly accelerate the Y2038 problem!)

Globally centralized timekeeping could certainly make for an interesting premise to a dystopian sci-fi novel. Time really does fly when the Fed controls the NTP root nodes.