Heavy Dragonplate or Extra Thin Tissue Paper?

[kyzabee]

Oops - saying the quiet bit out loud!

"If cherry-picking isn't good enough, or if critics come up with something I didn't think of - no prob - I'll just tweak the numbers to set it all straight again.

So he has just admitted, amongst other things, to manipulating the numbers to make his hypothesis unbeatable. We knew (as discussed amply upthread) that that was what he was doing, but it's still a bit strange to see him lay it out so plainly and unapologetically.

Wow!! This is an incredible and devastating admission. To summarize, Kyler has set himself up like used car salesman, with multiple ways to get paid. Ask for a sticker discount, he makes it up on financing. Ask for a lower financing rate, he makes it up on a bundled warranty sale. His trade offs are Poisson parameters and consequent probability assumptions. It might work for the uninitiated, but to folks who’ve worked with large math models where many dials leads to greater errors, this is an absolutely revealing confession. I count this as fatal process error #8 that Kyler has admitted to. (yes I’m counting and yes each one is fatal)

I'm glad you're making a collection! You'll have to send me the list when you're done. I'll stick it on my wall.

[kyzabee]

The analysis is persuasive that the Book of Mormon was not written in a similar way to those other pseudo-Biblical books. That only implies it wasn’t written in the 19th century, however, if you assume that “19th-century pseudo-Biblical writing” is one particular thing with a fixed set of rules that are accurately exemplified by that handful of texts.

Rasmussen simply assumes, and has in no way shown, that any possible 19th-century effort at a Biblical-sounding book would have to be similar in style to his basket of examples. He assumes that if Smith had written such a book, its prose style would necessarily have resembled that of those other books.

Which were written for sale as entertainment rather than as a hoax, by educated professional writers, whose texts were edited for publication.

Gee. Could every single one of those major differences between the other books and the Book of Mormon perhaps all tend to make the Book of Mormon a lot more archaic in style than the others? Would the professional writers have been willing and able to keep their archaism down to an amusing flavor, fairly consistent with the King James Bible? In contrast, could an uneducated fraudster have clumsily ladled on every archaic stylistic quirk he had ever heard in sermons or hymns or Shakespeare or Bunyan, ham-handedly overdoing it wildly as he dictated to a scribe from his hat?

No, instead of that it is astronomically more likely that a native speaker of 16th century English composed the Book of Mormon while employing 19th century vocabulary and concepts. This is Rasmussen’s premise.

Thanks for reading, PG!

"however, if you assume that “19th-century pseudo-Biblical writing” is one particular thing with a fixed set of rules that are accurately exemplified by that handful of texts."

It's definitely an assumption at this point that Carmack's four examples are characteristic of attempts at biblical writing. But, then again, Carmack's up to 25 of those pseudobiblical works that all tend to employ similar syntactic patterns. At some point a black swan could show up, and I'd have to revise my estimate. But for the moment I can only work (conservatively) with the data I have available.

And if you think someone in the 19th century could end up with the Book of Mormon's Early Modern English (along with the extinct semantics!) via clumsy ladeling during the dictation, go ahead and try that method and see how it goes. I'd be very interested in the results.

[kyzabee]

I still think that the bigger problem with Rasmussen's analysis is that the actual Book of Mormon language really isn't unlikely at all, if Smith clumsily overdid his archaism. But the other side of the equation also needs this big revision, to remove the Sharpshooter Fallacy. In the end, for my money the linguistic analysis of the Book of Mormon only makes it seem more obvious that Smith made it up.

You aren't the first to think of this, and some scholars have referred to the potential phenomenon as "biblical hypercorrection". The Carmack article that I pulled the data from spends a great deal of time discussing the theory of hypercorrection and why it doesn't work in the case of the Book of Mormon.

https://journal.interpreterfoundation.o ... haic-text/

[kyzabee]

Rasmussen’s professional reputation is shot. How do you write the above and expect to be taken seriously?

It's true Lem. All true professionals are stodgy sticks-in-the-mud who never permit themselves a clever turn of phrase. I'll never be able to show my face in their smoke-filled faculty lounge ever again.

[kyzabee]

Also, looks like Billy never addressed the way I handled the extinct Early Modern English semantics. I'm sure he'll get around to it, though.

[Physics Guy]

I read the paper by Carmack to which you linked, a year or two ago. The paper absolutely does not show that hypercorrection cannot explain the Book of Mormon language. It fails on exactly the same point that I have raised now. It may be interesting to see Carmack's further 20-odd cases of 19th-century pseudo-Biblical writing. My point is not answered just with a number of cases, however.

Were any of those 20-odd cases written by uneducated farmhands rather than educated authors?This obviously makes a big difference. Educated authors, especially professional ones, can be expected to do a lot better than uneducated amateurs at hitting a target dialect consistently, rather than frequently overshooting the mark.

Were any of these 20-odd cases published from a dictated first draft without editing or revision before publication? Professional editing, or even just revision through multiple drafts by an educated author, will again do a lot to rein in "hypercorrection".

Were any of these 20-odd cases produced as hoaxes rather than being offered for sale for entertainment or edification? If you're writing to please customers, you can't afford to make your prose too ugly for them. If instead you're seriously trying to convince them that your text really is archaic, however, then making your text seem strange and old-fashioned is more important than readability. So, even if ability and opportunity to hit consistent King James language are equal, a professional author writing for sale will tone down archaic features that read most awkwardly to the audience, while a hoaxer will deliberately highlight them.

I propose that 19th-century pseudo-Biblical writing is definitely not one single thing, but rather consists of at least two sharply distinct populations: pseudo-Biblical texts published after editing and revision by educated authors writing for sale to the public, on the one hand, and pseudo-Biblical texts printed from unedited dictation notes by uneducated hoaxers, on the other. No amount of sampling of the first population says anything about the second population.

Concluding that the second population would not do enough hypercorrection to account for the Book of Mormon language, just because the first population would not, makes no more sense than rating the incidence of ovarian cancer as extremely low, from studies conducted only on men. Carmack's paper rejecting hypercorrection takes a sample of four men, as it were. His conclusion will not become valid by looking at twenty-five men.

I admit that it will probably be hard to find many cases from the second population, besides the Book of Mormon. It's hard enough to find many cases from the first population. Them is, however, the breaks. To any unbiased observer, I submit, my hypothesis of two populations is an obvious one. There is no rule which says that you get to rule out an obvious alternative explanation for your data just because it's hard to test the alternative properly.

Even if bias is allowed, the prior probability of there being two distinct populations of 19th-century pseudo-Biblical writing, as I have proposed, must be enormously higher than the tiny probability you deduce for the Book of Mormon being part of the first population. Your analysis is therefore clearly underestimating, by astronomical factors, the probability of the Book of Mormon language being produced as deliberate fraud by uneducated amateur writers.

[kyzabee]

Thanks for the response PG.

First, this argument doesn't address the semantic argument, but that's fine.

Educated authors, especially professional ones, can be expected to do a lot better than uneducated amateurs at hitting a target dialect consistently, rather than frequently overshooting the mark.

If they were better at hitting the target of biblical syntax, why did they fall so short of the mark actually set by the Bible, and use many of these characteristics so sparingly? The answer, I think, is that these characteristics are generally not produced consciously--that these patterns represent unconscious habits formed as one picks up language from the surrounding culture, and that trying to reproduce them would be exceptionally laborious, even if one knew what to shoot for in the first place.

That would mean the uneducated amateur should be more likely to produce the syntax of his own dialect. Except every example we have of Joseph's own dialect remains a poor fit for what we see with the Book of Mormon.

Were any of these 20-odd cases published from a dictated first draft without editing or revision before publication? Professional editing, or even just revision through multiple drafts by an educated author, will again do a lot to rein in "hypercorrection".

That's an interesting thought, as obviously the Book of Mormon did undergo an editing process just a few years later, and it's clear from that process that Joseph was extremely uncomfortable with the syntax. That would indicate pretty strongly to me that it doesn't reflect his preferred psuedobiblical dialect.

But I don't buy that initial drafts of pseudobiblical works would produce large amounts of hypercorrection that would need to be reined in via editing. If so, we should easily be able to find lightly or poorly edited examples of that in the literature. And we don't. And enough of it sounds biblical (even if it actually isn't) that I would think any editor would probably let it slide as just part of the pseudobiblical style.

If instead you're seriously trying to convince them that your text really is archaic, however, then making your text seem strange and old-fashioned is more important than readability.

Again, this assumes both that it's possible to produce these patterns consciously, and that Joseph and company had time on their hands to go through and make it old-fashioned. But if this was really the goal, why edit it out a few years later? Had they really stopped needing to convince people that this was an archaic book?

I admit that it will probably be hard to find many cases from the second population, besides the Book of Mormon.

We should definitely keep looking for that black swan, but it's clear to me that the evidence we have, both from the pseudobiblical books and from wider database searches, suggests that we're unlikely to find what we're looking for in the 19th century.

[Gadianton]

Here's a prophecy kyzabee: Not a single BYU stats professor will ever publicly agree with any of your work.

[kyzabee]

Here's a prophecy kyzabee: Not a single BYU stats professor will ever publicly agree with any of your work.

But will they privately? Because that's all I really care about.

[Gadianton]

Sure, it's easier to lie to people in private and not risk putting one's reputation on the line by supporting obvious pseudoscience.