Suspicious Historical Math

Before beginning any research, first ask, “Does anything about the assertion seem suspicious or unlikely on its face?” For example, early in The Da Vinci Code, Brown claims that over a period of three hundred years, the Catholic Church burned five million witches at the stake in Europe around the fifteenth century.¹⁴ I was immediately suspicious of this “fact,” so I took out my calculator and did the math. Rome would have to burn forty-five women a day, every single day, nonstop for three hundred years. That’s a lot of firewood. Furthermore, a quick internet search revealed that the popula- tion of Europe at the time was about 50 million. If half were female (25 million) and half of those were adults (12.5 million), then some- thing like 40 percent of the entire adult female population perished at the hand of the Vatican. That’s more carnage than the Black Plague of 1347, which killed only one-third. Let’s just say this seems highly unlikely.

Текст шутливо проверяет сомнительное утверждение из «Кода да Винчи» с помощью простых подсчётов, показывая, что заявленное число сожжённых ведьм выглядит крайне неправдоподобно. Внизу собака выражает недоверчивый боковой взгляд — реакция на абсурдную статистику и историческую гиперболу. EN: The text humorously fact-checks a suspicious claim from The Da Vinci Code with simple calculations, showing that the stated number of burned witches seems highly implausible. The dog at the bottom gives a skeptical side-eye, reacting to the absurd statistics and historical exaggeration.

• @eternalclassic / 41933 2023-11-16