Well, the second picture is a 400-year-old painting, depicting Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. (So presumably the guy preaching is Ezekiel, obeying God’s instructions to tell the bones to join together and form bodies.)
This still leaves it rather unclear what the two pictures mean as epistemic statuses, but I take the first to mean “here I am just explaining what the mathematics says, so there’s not much scope for doubt” and the second to mean “here I am preaching religion, and you may if you wish dismiss me as a fanatic”. This seems consistent with what he says at the start of the second part: “Part 1 was a careful explanation of a subject I know very well. Part 2 is a controversial rant about a subject I don’t.”
I’ve been hanging too long with the Ribbonfarm crowd where the default epistemic status is “clown on fire jumping out of a helicopter”.
Part I is just math, part II is a prophecy of doom, and the pictures mean that I didn’t feel like coming up with actual epistemic probabilities for both.
Well, the second picture is a 400-year-old painting, depicting Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones. (So presumably the guy preaching is Ezekiel, obeying God’s instructions to tell the bones to join together and form bodies.)
This still leaves it rather unclear what the two pictures mean as epistemic statuses, but I take the first to mean “here I am just explaining what the mathematics says, so there’s not much scope for doubt” and the second to mean “here I am preaching religion, and you may if you wish dismiss me as a fanatic”. This seems consistent with what he says at the start of the second part: “Part 1 was a careful explanation of a subject I know very well. Part 2 is a controversial rant about a subject I don’t.”
I’ve been hanging too long with the Ribbonfarm crowd where the default epistemic status is “clown on fire jumping out of a helicopter”.
Part I is just math, part II is a prophecy of doom, and the pictures mean that I didn’t feel like coming up with actual epistemic probabilities for both.