bschaalje wrote:Effects of KJE make the situation more difficult to pin down. We will see.
Closed set attribution will not be of any help in dealing with archaic language.
It helps if the language actually existed....
bschaalje wrote:Effects of KJE make the situation more difficult to pin down. We will see.
Closed set attribution will not be of any help in dealing with archaic language.
harmony wrote:bschaalje wrote:Closed set attribution will not be of any help in dealing with archaic language.
It helps if the language actually existed....
It's interesting when one is an amatuer in these matters of the S/R theory to think wow they have done a kinghit on Jockers et al. Then a response to the paper in an email by one of the authors of the first paper, many flaws in the Schaalje paper are pointed out which I as a amatuer I did not see. The case in my opinion is definitely not closed. I'll ask the author if I can put their comments up here.
Daniel Peterson wrote:It does. I've got more copies of the text around my house than I can count.
You can even buy a copy of the Book of Mormon yourself, if you're at all interested. But, if you're not, I can still assure you that it's full of thees and thous and haths and beholds.
harmony wrote:I was referring to Reformed Egyptian, of course.
I can't believe you missed the sarcasm! Or maybe you didn't... LOL
aussieguy55 wrote:Hi Noel,
Yes, I have read the article and even with no knowledge of statistics the essential problems with the essay are clear.
1. Though the authors would like readers to believe that our use of NSC was "naïve" (as they write in the article), it was not in fact naïve. (It warrants mention that the statistician, Prof. Witten, who did the statistics on our project, is Tibsharani's former grad student. Tibsharani is the one who invented NSC. ) Our use of the algorithm was perfectly legit for what we applied it to. Schaalje misrepresents our objectives in order to create a straw man argument related to the business of a closed set of candidate authors.
2. Schaalje's primary complaint is that we use a closed set of candidate authors. That is a legitimate complaint and it is a point that we acknowledge quite clearly in the paper. That said, all authorship problems are ultimately closed set problems. You cannot test for every single person in the entire history of the world. Instead, you have some candidates and wish to figure out which among them is the most likely culprit. Our objective was to test *existing* theories of authorship of the Book of Mormon. And that's exactly what we did. We took the list of suspects and tried to rank them in terms of their likelihood. We point out in the paper that it is possible that the *real* author is not in the closed set. The real author could, for example, be Moroni or Napoleon. The point of our work was to "reassess" prior theories of authorship using machine classification. Our result is only compelling if you first accept the historical evidence and then accept that the candidates we tested represent a good set of candidates. The Schaalje paper creates a straw man argument and then plays fast and lose with the facts of our paper, cherry picking little bits here and there to make it look like we did something other than what we did, or that we had a goal other than what we had. In my opinion the fundamental conclusion of our work is that it lends additional support to the spalding-rigdon theory of authorship.
3. Schaalje makes a silly point of testing for Rigdon in the Federalist papers. No one ever suspected Rigdon of writing the Federalist papers. And then to make sure that his results pack the right punch to match his bias, he uses an entirely different feature set from ours and then, voila, they say that Rigdon shows up as most likely author of some of the Federalist papers. This is just plain hogwash.
4. Schaalje tries to suggest that text length is a factor. we checked that there was indeed no correlation between text length in our study and the results we derived. I can't remember if that was included in the final version of our paper.
For what it is worth, Schaalje does offer some interesting ideas but ultimately they are constructed out of an entirely different data set and used in an entirely different approach. And all of this they did in the context of statistics and formulas that only a highly trained statistician would understand. In my opinion, they should have first sought to have the statistical methodology reviewed and published in a journal of statistics. They suggest a modification of NSC and NSC is an approach that has been peer reviewed by statisticians who have the necessary expertise to evaluate it. In my opinion, Schaalje played fast and loose with everything in our own work in order to present a critique that would be pointless to try and rebut. Their paper is full of baffling formulas and mathematical slights of hand. In my opinion, it says virtually nothing. Unfortunately, it will achieve exactly what the authors hope, namely, it will provide them with a peer reviewed paper that they can hold up and claim to be a rebuttal of our paper. Anyone who can read and understand it will see that it is nothing of the sort, but few in Schaalje's target audience will, I suspect, actually try to read it.
Matt