Scott Alexander (author/host)

And why is she so crazy about religion?

She spends all her time praying, and when she's on trial she spends like an hour a day haggling over the terms of her oath of honesty.

In the third, she's mentally ill.

We know that being slightly manic is a common trait of very successful people.

The drive to push past all obstacles and do the impossible tends to correlate with lots of energy, absolute self-confidence, and a sort of hypnotic charisma.

By this theory, she's slightly more manic than that.

Hallucinations are culturally mediated.

She hallucinates saints telling her to do good at first and then later save the world.

Of course, this doesn't explain her being a completely untaught military genius, or a completely untaught theology genius.

Generously, it explains part of her charisma, and charisma is certainly useful for warfare, but she's clearly very intelligent too, which this doesn't predict, and we also need to ignore all the testimony about prophecy and miracles, or claim it was all coincidental.

There's some pretty huge complexity penalties here.

Footnote.

That is to say that a. the more complex an explanation has to be to explain Joan's marvels, the less good it is, and b. a simple explanation that relies heavily on coincidence is actually a complex explanation in disguise.

Back to the text.

All these models involve her being very charismatic because she is very charismatic.

It's very hard to read her and not fall under her sway.

Mark Twain was a member of her fan club, so was George Bernard Shaw.

So am I.

Twain was an unconventional Christian at best, and Shaw was a full-blown atheist, but her charisma is strong enough to reach across the gap of ages and ensnare us all.

We know she was charismatic.