<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>ornxka</author><text>&amp;gt;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&amp;#x27;t true. Watergate embroiled 12 of the most powerful men in the world-and they couldn&amp;#x27;t keep a lie for three weeks. You&amp;#x27;re telling me 12 apostles could keep a lie for 40 years? Absolutely impossible.&lt;p&gt;- Charles Colson, advisor to Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal</text><parent_chain><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>For me, the thing that kills the theory for me is the idea that, &lt;i&gt;in the middle of western Europe being about as politically stable and integrated as modern Afghanistan&lt;/i&gt;, all the warlords pillaging the country to kill each other were able to not only unanimously agree on &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s change the year to a nice round number&amp;quot;, but were also able to coordinate this without leaving &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; historical records of it.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;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 &lt;i&gt;someone&lt;/i&gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;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, &amp;quot;how do we hide this from 21st century archaeologists trying to discover our time crimes?&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>antognini</author><text>The point about the Gregorian calendar being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13 is especially interesting because it&amp;#x27;s easy to see how you could regard it as a sort of &amp;quot;smoking gun&amp;quot; of the Phantom Time Hypothesis.  The supposed lack of archaeological evidence is suggestive, but can be pretty easily dismissed with &amp;quot;absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.&amp;quot;  But here you have a prediction that about 300 years are missing and this would directly explain the observed discrepancy in the drift of the calendar.&lt;p&gt;As the author points out the problem is resolved because the Gregorian calendar reform only intended to reset the calendar back to the time of the Council of Nicaea, not the date when the Julian calendar was originally adopted.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a neat example of how a theory&amp;#x27;s smoking gun can sometimes have an entirely unrelated explanation and a warning that even when you think you&amp;#x27;ve found conclusive proof, it&amp;#x27;s important to keep digging.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Did the early medieval era ever take place?</title><url>https://jonn.substack.com/p/did-the-early-medieval-era-ever-really</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>t_mann</author><text>Fyi, someone actually built a formal model to demonstrate that large conspiracies are probabilistically doomed to get exposed:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.csmonitor.com&amp;#x2F;Science&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;0127&amp;#x2F;Can-mathematics-help-solve-conspiracy-theory-debates&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.csmonitor.com&amp;#x2F;Science&amp;#x2F;2016&amp;#x2F;0127&amp;#x2F;Can-mathematics-...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;However, the model makes a few simplifying assumptions, eg a single leak is sufficient to expose the conspiracy, and I think it also doesn&amp;#x27;t cover mortality. A conspiracy that wasn&amp;#x27;t exposed up until the death of all in the know would probably be considered as succesful by the model. I think it&amp;#x27;s fair to assume that the probability of getting exposed at least significantly drops at that point.</text><parent_chain><item><author>kmeisthax</author><text>For me, the thing that kills the theory for me is the idea that, &lt;i&gt;in the middle of western Europe being about as politically stable and integrated as modern Afghanistan&lt;/i&gt;, all the warlords pillaging the country to kill each other were able to not only unanimously agree on &amp;quot;let&amp;#x27;s change the year to a nice round number&amp;quot;, but were also able to coordinate this without leaving &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; historical records of it.&lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#x27;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 &lt;i&gt;someone&lt;/i&gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;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, &amp;quot;how do we hide this from 21st century archaeologists trying to discover our time crimes?&amp;quot;</text></item><item><author>antognini</author><text>The point about the Gregorian calendar being off by only 10 days instead of the expected 13 is especially interesting because it&amp;#x27;s easy to see how you could regard it as a sort of &amp;quot;smoking gun&amp;quot; of the Phantom Time Hypothesis.  The supposed lack of archaeological evidence is suggestive, but can be pretty easily dismissed with &amp;quot;absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.&amp;quot;  But here you have a prediction that about 300 years are missing and this would directly explain the observed discrepancy in the drift of the calendar.&lt;p&gt;As the author points out the problem is resolved because the Gregorian calendar reform only intended to reset the calendar back to the time of the Council of Nicaea, not the date when the Julian calendar was originally adopted.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s a neat example of how a theory&amp;#x27;s smoking gun can sometimes have an entirely unrelated explanation and a warning that even when you think you&amp;#x27;ve found conclusive proof, it&amp;#x27;s important to keep digging.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Did the early medieval era ever take place?</title><url>https://jonn.substack.com/p/did-the-early-medieval-era-ever-really</url></story>