The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

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_Lemmie
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Lemmie »

I see Bruce Dale continues to disagree with the statements of the editor in charge of the peer review of his work:
Bruce E. Dale on May 28, 2019 at 3:27 pm said:

....We have summarized a lot of evidence that supports the claim that the Book of Mormon is an authentic record set in ancient Mesoamerica. Brian and I invite everyone to examine the evidence.

Bruce


His editor thinks differently:
Allen Wyatt on May 7, 2019 at 3:11 pm said:

....That doesn’t change the fact that the paper isn’t an attempt to prove the historicity of the Book of Mormon; it is an effort to prove that Dr. Coe’s multiple assertions that it is NOT historical are mistaken. (Perhaps this is too subtle of a distinction; I’ll let the reader make that determination.)


Apparently it's too subtle of a distinction for the authors of the paper as well.
_Lemmie
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Lemmie »

Re: the persistence of cultural patterns, Billy Shear's logic is certainly unassailable:
Bruce E. Dale on May 28, 2019 at 2:55 pm said:

Billy,

Regarding the issue of migrations and their (lack of?) northward direction, I have a couple of comments.

Cultural patterns tend to persist. For example, Coe mentions repeatedly how much the Maya culture looked toward and drew from the ancient Olmecs. The Book of Mormon takes place between 600 BC and 421 AD, so it places the northward migrations between the two time periods you mention above–Olmec times and the Classic. In my mind, that makes the northward migrations in the Book of Mormon an even better fit with Coe’s book…not a worse one as you suggest above.

...Again, as a cultural phenomenon, the northward migration described in the Book of Mormon certainly fits in with established earlier and later patterns.

Cultural patterns do tend to persist.


Billy Shears on May 28, 2019 at 4:42 pm said:

Hi Bruce,

Thanks for the reply. I’d rather not get too derailed on this one point because many of the other correspondences are more interesting, but I will offer my thoughts on your message.

First, I don’t think “northward migration” is an example of the type of social and cultural pattern that persists. If a group of people living in Mesoamerica c. AD 2,500 had a cultural pattern of immigrating to the north that persisted through Book of Mormon times and continued until A.D. 900, by then they would no longer be in Mesoamerica—they’d be in the Arctic Circle.

The Book of Mormon mentioning a migration to the north that happened in 56 BC is not a bull’s eye for migrations in The Maya that happened 2,000 years earlier or 1,000 years later.
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Darth J »

honorentheos wrote:Richard,
You are welcome to do this test of the King James version of the Bible versus The Maya. I would be interested in the results.

But to make it a good comparison with our work, you would have to test claims of fact in both books. For example, the fact that both the Maya and the New Testament had a baptismal rite would count as a positive correspondence, but the fact that precious stones in the Bible are diamonds, pearls and that such precious stones are unknown in Mesoamerica (and unmentioned in The Maya) would count as a negative correspondence..
Bruce


Almost makes you wonder why Jesus told the Mayans about pearls, if the Mayans would have had no idea what they were.

3 Nephi 14:6

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

But then, maybe the Mayans did know what he was talking about, because they had them.

4 Nephi

And now, in this two hundred and first year there began to be among them those who were lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel, and all manner of fine pearls, and of the fine things of the world.
Last edited by Guest on Wed May 29, 2019 10:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.
_Darth J
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Darth J »

Speaking of Bayes theory and the mention of pearls in the Book of Mormon, you know where pearls were definitely known and worn as costly apparel? Ancient Italy.

https://www.jewelpedia.net/pearls-and-s ... an-empire/

In ancient Rome, a pearl was a unio, for unique, as no two were exactly alike. Pliny the Elder (AD 23–79) noted that pearls occupied “the very highest position among valuables.” He criticized the conspicuous consumption of his status-seeking compatriots. In his Naturalis Historia (translated by Bostock and Riley, 1855), he complained bitterly of the profligate lifestyles of his fellow citizens. Pliny gave us details of women’s taste for pearls at the time:

“Our ladies quite glory in having these suspended from their fingers, or two or three of them dangling from their ears. For the purpose of ministering to these luxurious tastes, there are various names and wearisome refinements which have been devised by profuseness and prodigality; for after inventing these ear-rings, they have given them the name of ‘crotalia,’ or castanet pendants, as though quite delighted even with the rattling of the pearls as they knock against each other; and now, at the present day, the poorer classes are even affecting them, as people are in the habit of saying, that ‘a pearl worn by a woman in public, is as good as a lictor walking before her.’ Nay, even more than this, they put them on their feet, and that, not only on the laces of their sandals, but all over the shoes; it is not enough to wear pearls, but they must tread upon them, and walk with them under foot as well.”

But the worst offenders, according to Pliny, were the ruling classes. He related two stories in which pearls were consumed for no better reason than to advertise wealth and “glorify the palate.” One of these stories detailed the famous wager Cleopatra made to Anthony that she would be able to host the most expensive banquet in history. According to Pliny, Cleopatra won the bet by removing one of her prized pearl earrings, dissolving it in vinegar, and dispatching it down her gullet.


Note how Pliny the Elder's criticism of the wealthy wearing pearls as conspicuous consumption exactly matches 4 Nephi, as well as HAPPENING IN THE SAME TIME PERIOD (compare the time frame set out in 4 Nephi 1:1-6 with Pliny the Elder's lifetime, which was 23-79 A.D.).

Perhaps we should assign a numerical value to calculate the probability of this "coincidence" that uneducated farm boy Joseph Smith, Jr. just happened to correctly guess about the ancient Italian peninsula.
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Res Ipsa »

honorentheos wrote:It looks like Dr. Bruce Dale had some time to post today and added a few new comments. He didn't tee up a new correspondence for Billy Shears to send flying but he did reply to a number of prior comments.

Of those, I found this one the most odd. Keep in mind it was made in response to a poster named Richard who had suggested that were the same approach to have been used but with the Bible rather than The Maya for comparison to the Book of Mormon, and the base assumption being Smith was using the Bible as a template to describe a migrated Hebrew group it would be an even better match. The reply:

Richard,
You are welcome to do this test of the King James version of the Bible versus The Maya. I would be interested in the results.

But to make it a good comparison with our work, you would have to test claims of fact in both books. For example, the fact that both the Maya and the New Testament had a baptismal rite would count as a positive correspondence, but the fact that precious stones in the Bible are diamonds, pearls and that such precious stones are unknown in Mesoamerica (and unmentioned in The Maya) would count as a negative correspondence..
Bruce


I can't tell if he genuinely doesn't get the counter argument or is being intentionally obtuse? What does the Maya have to do with this if no one but a handful of Mormon apologists think Smith intentionally had Mayans in mind when the Book of Mormon was composed? Is it possible he has been so long with this Maya theory he's forgotten others exist and should be considered? Weird.


Note that Bruce recognizes in his answer that pearls should be counted as a "negative" correspondence because they appear in the Book of Mormon but not The Mayans. But their stated methodology says that they disregarded all statements in the Book of Mormon that weren't addressed in The Maya. He can't keep his own methodology straight.
​“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _honorentheos »

Darth J wrote:
honorentheos wrote:Richard,
You are welcome to do this test of the King James version of the Bible versus The Maya. I would be interested in the results.

But to make it a good comparison with our work, you would have to test claims of fact in both books. For example, the fact that both the Maya and the New Testament had a baptismal rite would count as a positive correspondence, but the fact that precious stones in the Bible are diamonds, pearls and that such precious stones are unknown in Mesoamerica (and unmentioned in The Maya) would count as a negative correspondence..
Bruce


Almost makes you wonder why Jesus told the Mayans about pearls, if the Mayans would have had no idea what they were.

3 Nephi 14:6

Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you.

But then, maybe the Mayans did know what he was talking about, because they had them.

4 Nephi

And now, in this two hundred and first year there began to be among them those who were lifted up in pride, such as the wearing of costly apparel, and all manner of fine pearls, and of the fine things of the world.

Damn. Classic Darth take down.

(Nice to see you around, by the way.)
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
_honorentheos
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _honorentheos »

Res Ipsa wrote:
honorentheos wrote:It looks like Dr. Bruce Dale had some time to post today and added a few new comments. He didn't tee up a new correspondence for Billy Shears to send flying but he did reply to a number of prior comments.

Of those, I found this one the most odd. Keep in mind it was made in response to a poster named Richard who had suggested that were the same approach to have been used but with the Bible rather than The Maya for comparison to the Book of Mormon, and the base assumption being Smith was using the Bible as a template to describe a migrated Hebrew group it would be an even better match. The reply:

Richard,
You are welcome to do this test of the King James version of the Bible versus The Maya. I would be interested in the results.

But to make it a good comparison with our work, you would have to test claims of fact in both books. For example, the fact that both the Maya and the New Testament had a baptismal rite would count as a positive correspondence, but the fact that precious stones in the Bible are diamonds, pearls and that such precious stones are unknown in Mesoamerica (and unmentioned in The Maya) would count as a negative correspondence..
Bruce


I can't tell if he genuinely doesn't get the counter argument or is being intentionally obtuse? What does the Maya have to do with this if no one but a handful of Mormon apologists think Smith intentionally had Mayans in mind when the Book of Mormon was composed? Is it possible he has been so long with this Maya theory he's forgotten others exist and should be considered? Weird.


Note that Bruce recognizes in his answer that pearls should be counted as a "negative" correspondence because they appear in the Book of Mormon but not The Mayans. But their stated methodology says that they disregarded all statements in the Book of Mormon that weren't addressed in The Maya. He can't keep his own methodology straight.

Also a great point. They did this with their comparisons with MF and VotH too. There are a few places they said something mentioned in one of the texts wasn't a match for something in The Maya and used it to bump the negative scoring. The earthen box example, say.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Arc »

honorentheos wrote:Damn. Classic Darth take down.

(Nice to see you around, by the way.)

Looks as though the shore battery Darth J has opened up.

Setting aside the Bayesian explosion in the main powder magazine, how many more correspondences broadsides like this one can the good ship Dales take before it slips beneath the waves?

Ships coming into the range of coastal artillery should understand that shore batteries come in multiples. Their 16 inch guns are well protected, have essentially unlimited ammunition and are, above all, exceedingly difficult to sink.
"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Steven Weinberg
_Lemmie
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Lemmie »

In an attempt to answer a Billy Shears comment, Bruce has now changed the hypothesis.

The original:
It is calculated as the probability that the statement is true if whoever wrote the Book of Mormon was guessing divided by the probability that the statement is true if instead the Book of Mormon is fact-based and essentially historical.

So the null hypothesis H (bolded above) is:

Joseph Smith made guesses while writing a fictional Book of Mormon,

and the hypothesis not-H is:

the Book of Mormon is NOT fiction.

But today:

Bruce E. Dale
on May 29, 2019 at 1:26 pm said:

Billy,
More on the calendar issue later, but the null hypothesis you propose is not the null hypothesis we actually deal with in the paper.

I wish you do us the courtesy of focusing on what we actually did in the paper, not what you think we should have done.

Our “null hypothesis” or the Bayesian prior we assumed, was that the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with ancient Indian cultures as Dr. Coe describes those cultures in The Maya.


What?????
_Lemmie
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Lemmie »

Here's the relevant exchange re the hypothesis issue, where even taking Bruce's new and far more limited hypothesis into account, Billy points out the continuing invalidity of the approach:

Bruce E. Dale
on May 29, 2019 at 1:26 pm said:

Billy,
More on the calendar issue later, but the null hypothesis you propose is not the null hypothesis we actually deal with in the paper.

I wish you do us the courtesy of focusing on what we actually did in the paper, not what you think we should have done.

Our “null hypothesis” or the Bayesian prior we assumed, was that the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with ancient Indian cultures as Dr. Coe describes those cultures in The Maya.

Just set the Bayesian analysis aside for a while and focus on the correspondences without weighting them. Even in that limited case, it is obvious that the Book of Mormon has a great deal to do with ancient Indian cultures as described in The Maya.

We are going to go through those correspondences as long as the discussion continues or Interpreter is willing to host the discussion.

Once again, I invite you to read The Maya and the Book of Mormon…then make your own comparisons. And once again, I will happily buy a copy of The Maya for you.

Bruce


Billy Shears
on May 29, 2019 at 3:49 pm said:

Hi Bruce,

I’m happy to look at the specific points you raise, read the references in The Maya in detail, read the references in the Book of Mormon in context, consider your analysis, and then offer my own.

However, if you set up your analysis in a way that is invalid and insist that I approach the question in the way that you set it up, I’m not going to play ball.

Here is why.

In your paper, you said, “For a good introductory article to Bayesian statistics, see Wikipedia, s.v. ‘Bayes Theorem.'” According to that article, “If the events A1, A2,..., are mutually exclusive and exhaustive, i.e., one of them is certain to occur but no two can occur together, and we know their probabilities up to proportionality, then we can determine the proportionality constant by using the fact that their probabilities must add up to one.”

This point is crucial, because the formulas you are using implicitly assume that the two hypotheses are in fact mutually exclusive and exhaustive.

The way I am setting up the problem (A1 = “19th Century fictional origin” and A2 = “ancient Mesoamerican origin” at least approaches two mutually exclusive and exhaustive theories. In contrast, the way you are insisting this be set up (A1 = “Book of Mormon has nothing to do with ancient Indian cultures” and A2 = “the Book of Mormon is an authentic, factual record set in ancient Mesoamerica”) is neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive: the book could (and does) have many superficial similarities with ancient Indian cultures, yet the totality of the evidence points strongly to 19th Century American origins.

We could find an arbitrarily high number of superficial similarities between the Book of Mormon and the Maya, but such comparisons have no bearing on whether the Book of Mormon is “an authentic, factual record set in ancient Mesoamerica.” If we want to use a Bayesian analysis to answer that question, it needs to be set up properly with two mutually exclusive and exhaustive hypotheses. The mere question “What is the probability Joseph Smith guessed X right?” is not a valid Bayesian likelihood ratio.

If you think I’m being unreasonable or discourteous by using valid Bayesian reasoning to address the question of whether “the Book of Mormon is an authentic, factual record set in ancient Mesoamerica” rather than using invalid reasoning to address the question of whether “the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with ancient Indian cultures,” then say the word and I’ll respectfully refrain from making any further comments.

Best,

Billy

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