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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   13425 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 11, 2026

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If a claim is highly embarrassing to the claimant, then it’s more likely to be true, as normally people are unwilling to lie when they stand to gain only shame, humiliation, and loss of status.

That is not the case here and you are misapplying a very niche concept and trying to sell it as some sort of bayesian reasoning tool.

The Criterion of Embarrassment is mostly used for Biblical apologetics to justify believing in the Crucifixion. It has very limited usefulness elsewhere; it's not some kind of general rule that historians use to evaluate the plausibility of historical narratives.

"This is more likely to be true because it makes the narrator look bad" has a certain amount of general truthiness to it, but it still needs to be balanced against other factors, like plausibility and how the teller stands to gain from it even if it does cast them in a negative light.

There is a very obvious benefit to Hamas lying about Israelis raping Palestinian prisoners with dogs. It is extremely unlikely to decrease morale or enrollment of new recruits--what, they're not afraid of being imprisoned or bombed or run over by tanks, but the rape-dogs will terrify them? Come now. Atrocity propaganda almost always serves to increase morale and recruitment by representing the enemy as unspeakable monsters. Lying about it also serves the very valuable function of generating more propaganda to be repeated by people who hate Jews.

The Criterion of Embarrassment is mostly used for Biblical apologetics to justify believing in the Crucifixion. It has very limited usefulness elsewhere; it's not some kind of general rule that historians use to evaluate the plausibility of historical narratives.

I'm pretty sure it is. In fact I'm pretty sure the biblical use is just a specific instantiation of a more general historical use. If one court's historian says "we really kicked their asses that day!", you have no way of telling whether they're bragging, coping, or of it even happened, but if that entry is corroborated by the other court's historian saying "damn, we sure got are asses whooped that day", it's likely the original statement was accurate.

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