The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Meadowchik]

I sent Carrier a link to the paper. I thought he might be able to use it as an example of how not to use Bayes.

That would make two times at least. I sent it a couple days ago. Maybe after a couple more, he'll look into it.

[_Res Ipsa]

I sent Carrier a link to the paper. I thought he might be able to use it as an example of how not to use Bayes.

That would make two times at least. I sent it a couple days ago. Maybe after a couple more, he'll look into it.

Good. It would be fun to read his blow by blow takedown. The problem is that it’s so bad, I don’t know why he’d waste his time.

[_Res Ipsa]

1.6 Preservation of a city name over time. They cite one example as a hit. But it seems if this is a point worth making one ought to find similar consonant grouping preservation as fairly common to be a point in favor rather than against the Book of Mormon. The counter study should add up all the city names that failed to be preserved in Mayan naming for a proportionate counter probability. Just because.

Anyway, its late. But I'm not finding much to get excited over so far.

I started going point by point through the appendix. I stopped when they argued that the three references to slavery — none of which stated that the societies actually practiced slavery — should be counted as practicing slavery. They explicitly ignored their own criteria to manufacture a hit. In another entry, after their own parameters require them to accept the contents of Coe’s book, they argue with Coe’s interpretation of a Mayan text. The authors can’t restrain themselves from violating the terms of their own study to put their thumbs on the scale. And the peer reviewers were content to let them do so.

[Guest]

1.6 Preservation of a city name over time. They cite one example as a hit. But it seems if this is a point worth making one ought to find similar consonant grouping preservation as fairly common to be a point in favor rather than against the Book of Mormon. The counter study should add up all the city names that failed to be preserved in Mayan naming for a proportionate counter probability. Just because.

Anyway, its late. But I'm not finding much to get excited over so far.

I started going point by point through the appendix. I stopped when they argued that the three references to slavery — none of which stated that the societies actually practiced slavery — should be counted as practicing slavery. They explicitly ignored their own criteria to manufacture a hit. In another entry, after their own parameters require them to accept the contents of Coe’s book, they argue with Coe’s interpretation of a Mayan text. The authors can’t restrain themselves from violating the terms of their own study to put their thumbs on the scale. And the peer reviewers were content to let them do so.

It's difficult to go through them and assume sincerity on the part of the authors, unfortunately.

That they are accurately reflecting Coe's descriptions seems to be a given even among those criticizing the study for it's issues in using Bayes. But to me there seem to be glaring issues with the way they present the correlated items between Coe and the Book of Mormon in Appendix A that undermines the enterprise at its most basic assumptions.

Going back to 1.1, the quote from Coe focuses on the discovery that the Mayans were not an empire with a central government but were, instead, a Balkanized collective of City-States each no larger than the distance of an average day's travel. Fair enough. But what did the study present as evidence that Book of Mormon was a hit for this issue? Descriptions of City-States, each with local rule and roughly a day's travel apart? Nope. They chose an artifact of language - that the Book of Mormon fails to describe either the Nephites or the Lamanites as a nation. As I noted above, the Book of Mormon repeated describes both as "the people of the Nephites" or "the people of the Lamanites". But more damningly, the book clearly describes both having a chief ruler of some sort throughout their history who had authority over "the people of..." and in locations located multiple day's marches away from one another.

In other words, they failed to accurately identify and list the characteristics of the Mayan culture being compared to the Book of Mormon. And that seems to be the case with each one I've looked at. Like you point out above, there seem to be multiple strong lines of criticism that could be categorized as, "Misrepresentations of the parallel between the Mayan and Book of Mormon people", "Comparative probability that Smith's description originated from trying to describe a 7th Century BCE Israelite diaspora contextualized in a 19th C. Christian belief system informed by racist beliefs towards the Native Americans", or similar.

It's odd that it's being met on the Interpreter site with such enthusiasm even still. At least, I haven't seen many critical comments other than those that appear to have originated from this board. ChurchIsTrue seems to be the exception in pointing out there are compounding order of magnitude issues with the negatives in the Book of Mormon that just intuitively seem fatal. It gives one the impression of a team getting excited while estimating the number of times a train load of ping pong balls dumped over a tank "hit" it to estimate the total damage this potentially does, while ignoring the gapping holes in the tank caused by a handful of HEAP rounds they're willing to acknowledge matter.

At the end of the day, what this demonstrates is the old, "The physical evidence doesn't matter compared to the witness of the Holy Ghost" argument is BS and an argument of last resort. Turns out, it matters a whole helluvalot to some people when they imagine it works in their favor. If only it had proved to hold up...

[_honorentheos]

Continuing on. Point 1.4 cites the existence of art, culture, science, and other cultural refinements. Their cause for noting this as a point for is the description of institutions in the Book of Mormon. But where is the evidence of culture? Art? Refined civilization and sciences? Where is the actual hit in the Book of Mormon that shows something there which was beyond the experience and cultural level of the imagnations of Joseph Smith? Elsewhere they note the assumption that culture in the classic period could appear in proto form earlier in the period overlapping when the Nephites supposedly existed. So, where is it? Smith playing post office in his mind isn't a hit matching what Coe describes in the cited parallel. So far, it seems like 4 misses that should be against not for historicity.

These "hits" are hilarious. You ought to start a new thread the focuses on discussing these numbered points. You could call it, "The Dales' Greatest Hits."

I'm imagining there'd be 131 of them. Whew, I'm not sure I want to spend that much time given the lack of examples that have held up on first review so far. But it might be interesting to put something up on Reddit and crowdsource the work. All it seems to take is a reasonable face value reading of the Coe quote and familiarity with the Book of Mormon. You know, the things the authors said were critical criteria for their engaging in the effort according to one of their comments. Turns out we agree, but I'm doubting their ability to meet those criteria.

ETA: I should note I appreciate the expression of support. I think I probably write like I'm even more of a dick than I am. Which, granted, is still a bit of dick.

[_honorentheos]

As I read through the points, it occurs to me the authors may be genuinely blind to the possibility that Smith was inventing a culture from out of the Bible and diverse 19th century ideas regarding the mound builders. It seems their analysis assumes if such a possibility exists, it is best explained by the theory Smith read it first in another attempt to describe an offshoot of the lost tribes arriving in the Americas and serving as an explanation for the origins of the Native Americans.

They respond to a commenter who raised this question saying essentially their comparison of Manuscript Found and A View of the Hebrews addresses the hypothesis that Smith may have been trying to describe a different, more immediate Native American culture than that of Mayans. That's the response to asking why they didn't compare a null hypothesis of sorts in the form of Smith writing a 19th century text using any source available to him? Hmm.

That said, reading the other appendixes is entertaining. Practicing the law of Moses and speaking Hebrew are counted as negatives against The View of the Hebrews, for example. But the Nephites practiced the law of Moses according to the Book of Mormon (Jacob 4 says it explicitly, and 4 Nephi 1:12 tells us that they stopped doing so after Christ arrived) and spoke Hebrew up to the time of Mormon at least who would have written in Hebrew if the plates had allowed. So...seems like they didn't apply their negatives uniformly even when the Book of Mormon was explicitly saying something applied that they saw as a Mayan's misses in the other two books being evaluated.

[_honorentheos]

Alright, I kept going with the points. 1.7 - densely populated cities. Coe cites certain cities of around 6 sq. miles being densely populated. It would seem that the Book of Mormon, to be accurate here, would need to point out multiple densely populated cities. Instead, the authors point to Mormon 1:7 which states the "whole face of the land had become covered with buildings, and the people were as numerous almost, as it were the sand of the sea." This is after 4 Nephi says something similar referencing the people becoming numerous and spreading out over the whole face of the land and becoming wealthy. They give this a lower weight because they say the VoH could have been a source. Umm, what about not matching what Coe actually described?

[_honorentheos]

I'm now fairly confident that if the same 131 points given as positives for the Book of Mormon, the 6 against, and 12 which they contest were taken as provided along with the non-duplicates from the assessment of the other two books as representative statements about Mayan culture and peoples, a fair assessment of how the Book of Mormon lines up would result in an embarrassing reversal of the results. This study could quite easily be turned back into a devestating dismissal of the proposition Joseph Smith was accurately describing Mesoamerica and the Maya by just extracting out the central consideration from Coe's statements chosen by the authors and not forcing meaning out of the Book of Mormon beyond what the text actually says. Since they have identified the statements as ones they accept and have recieved general support it could prove to be fatal overreach. Allowing a non-lds expert on the Maya to confirm the summary of statements prior to evaluating the correspondence or contradiction in the Book of Mormon may lend a little weight to it as well.

It's interesting, in any case. They picked the points. They should expect to be able to live with results that clean up the study but keep them. One would hope anyway if one assumes the pursuit is for truth and not to sustain a prior agenda anyway.

[_Physics Guy]

could you, or physics guy, or lemmie, maybe analytics, I don't know about his field, comment on the certainty published - 10 ^ 132 (Im not looking at the number exactly right now) and how often legitimate and very well respected scientific findings achieve this level of certainty?

Bayes is just a hobby with me; it's rarely used in my field. Not even experimentalists resort to it often. I don't know when I've heard an experimental physicist talk about evidence for a hypothesis; they generally just measure numbers and compare them with theoretical predictions, and both the theory and the measurement are precise enough that it's either an obvious Yes or an obvious No. The data points either hug the theory curve or they don't. You could dress it up in Bayesian language but it would just be longwinded.

In experimental high energy particle physics, which is not my field, there's a whole lot of background noise, and you're trying to infer what happened in a very brief instant from its later consequences. So Bayesian reasoning is probably much more important there—or at least it could be. Things are pretty Gaussian for them so they may still be able to get away with simple estimates. I know the standard for claiming to have discovered a new particle is a signal five standard deviations above background noise, so about a 1 in 3.5 million chance that it's just a fluke. Then they keep on measuring, of course, and the chance that it's not real steadily falls as the data accumulates. They'll give you a Nobel prize long before you get to 1 in 10^132, though.

My attitude is that no extremely low probability estimates are ever valid or even meaningful, because the chance that some unknown thing might be wrong in the analysis is going to be higher than the reported chance.

[_I have a question]

Has anyone in the comments section of the Interpreter paper attempted to support the Dales analysis and explain why the statistical calculations are valid Bayes Theorem calculations?