Top all-time · #19598
Andrew Holt
Personal blog · apholt.comhistoryphilosophy
Andrew Holt's personal blog at apholt.com covers history and philosophy. Since 2023, 4 different Hacker News readers have linked it 5 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-06-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters cite Andrew Holt's posts on religion and violence, including death toll estimates for the Crusades and the claim that religion is not the main cause of war. The links support the commenters' own points.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
History, Religion, and Academia
Most-linked posts?
- /2019/01/30/death-estimates-for-the-crusades/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-06
What Hacker News says?
The idea that religion causes more deaths than non-religion is absurd in the 21st history (hitler, Stalin, mao) and is a myth when you take in full world history. An index of all known wars in history indicated 93% of wars were not religious. https://apholt.com/2023/01/03/the-myth-of-religion-as-the-ca...
Comment linking /2023/01/03/the-myth-of-religion-as-the-cause-of-most-wars/
on “The Book of Kells, now digitized and available online”I by-and-large don't believe Anthropic that this is their complete list. The model's behavior isn't consistent with only this. Granted, they aren't saying what their starting materials lean is. Claude is too conventionally WASP (white anglo-saxon protestant aka puritan). While Scandinavian open-mindedness falls in the "Western" thinking it's being programmed to reject here, Eastern philosphy as well as African and S…
Comment linking /2018/11/08/religion-and-the-100-worst-atrocities-in-history/
on “World_sim: LLM prompted to act as a sentient CLI universe simulator”Oh come on, have some perspective: academia has millions more people to slaughter before they catch up with the cult of Christianity. https://apholt.com/2019/01/30/death-estimates-for-the-crusad... John Shertzer Hittell– Estimates 1,000,000 total dead for the crusades to the East covering the period from 1095 to 1291. “In the two centuries of this warfare one million persons had been slain, but it had not been witho…
Comment linking /2019/01/30/death-estimates-for-the-crusades/
on “GPT-4 Details Leaked”> We now live in the most peaceful time in human history. I would say we live in the most widespread Uneasy Peace in human history. And unlike religious peace which had occasional conflicts, a break in the peace now would mean annihilation. Is general peace, risk of annihilation better than occasional petty wars without annihilation? > And just to be clear, we're contrasting this time of unprecedented peace with ent…
Comment linking /2019/01/30/death-estimates-for-the-crusades/
on “Judge rules White House pressured social networks to “suppress free speech””