The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_honorentheos]

Honor:

I like it but the glaring problem with your analysis from the TBM perspective is that you don't give Joseph the break that you should give him. So, of course your results don't align with historicity. Proper TBM emphasis on Joseph's prophetic mission should always infect the analysis. This is a war in case you didn't realize.

Hmmm. Good point. I better give him 1 billion to one odds of being a prophet. Because in a billion people we're bound to have one prophet I guess. Too bad he just flubbed up the whole government thing in 1.1 by 1.97209022E57 to one. Guess the Book of Mormon isn't describing Mayans after all.

[_honorentheos]

Just to be clear, I'm not trying to be serious. I'm just showing that it's silly on it's face.

[_honorentheos]

I opted to post the above to The Interpreter comments section and let the mud slinging commence. I'm sure there are issues with my maths because maths, but such errors are of men and the result of having to write within the limitations of the internet using Arabic numerals. If I could write in the language of my imagination the maths would be too powerful to withstand as they come to me through the grace and inspiration of the goddesses.

I closed the post out with this, all of which took multiple posts and are awaiting moderation:

The same methods could be used to look at the LR caused by both the Book of Mormon and VotH describing coinage but The Maya not, or including the practice of the Law of Moses. We could use it to figure out how meaningful the absence of important features of Mayan society ought to weight in such as jade or cocoa. It’s all goofy math and anyone impressed by your results should see why now. But if we want to play this game, it will get stupid very very quickly and not likely to go in your favor.

Anyway, I congratulate you both on your paper. I hope it remains relevant to the discussion on the Book of Mormon for years to come.

I don't think the future is going to treat this paper kindly.

[Guest]

Might have found the source for the Dales' skeptical prior.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cr ... redirect=1

Horgan: What’s so great about Bayes’ Theorem?

Yudkowsky: For one thing, Bayes's Theorem is incredibly deep. So it's not easy to give a brief answer to that.

I might answer that Bayes's Theorem is a kind of Second Law of Thermodynamics for cognition. If you obtain a well-calibrated posterior belief that some proposition is 99% probable, whether that proposition is milk being available at the supermarket or global warming being anthropogenic, then you must have processed some combination of sufficiently good priors and sufficiently strong evidence. That's not a normative demand, it's a law. In the same way that a car can't run without dissipating entropy, you simply don't get an accurate map of the world without a process that has Bayesian structure buried somewhere inside it, even if the process doesn't explicitly represent probabilities or likelihood ratios. You had strong-enough evidence and a good-enough prior or you wouldn't have gotten there.

On a personal level, I think the main inspiration Bayes has to offer us is just the fact that there are rules, that there are iron laws that govern whether a mode of thinking works to map reality. Mormons are told that they'll know the truth of the Book of Mormon through feeling a burning sensation in their hearts. Let's conservatively set the prior probability of the Book of Mormon at one to a billion (against). We then ask about the likelihood that, assuming the Book of Mormon is false, someone would feel a burning sensation in their heart after being told to expect one. If you understand Bayes's Rule you can see at once that the improbability of the evidence is not commensurate with the improbability of the hypothesis it's trying to lift. You don't even have to make up numbers to see that the numbers don't add up - as Philip Tetlock found in his study of superforecasters, superforecasters often know Bayes's Rule but they rarely make up specific probabilities. On some level, it's harder to be fooled if you just realize on a gut level that there is math, that there is some math you'd do to arrive at the exact strength of the evidence and whether it sufficed to lift the prior improbability of the hypothesis. That you can't just make stuff up and believe what you want to believe because that doesn't work.

[_Gadianton]

H,

the main issue I have with your calculation is that it relies on way too many assumptions that each on their own would be unlikely for the dales to agree with.

they're never going to agree with using Lemmie's values as the denominators. But even if they did, all else becomes secondary until fleshing out how that constraint affects what's even possible (assuming we can fudge numbers away from zero a little otherwise it's DOA as is).

Really, to figure out even how to respond to them in a way that they'd comprehend, and I'm pretty sure there is no way forward here, I'd want to see at least a single example of what they imagine to be a calculation for a single LR. Well hell, maybe you can bait them into correcting your example to fit their logic, and that alone would be worth something.

[_honorentheos]

Thanks for the feedback, Gad. My thinking is your complaint is inevitable given there aren't any actual, reliable data sets one could use to NOT make assumptions that are going to be align with a persons a priori agreement or disagreement with one of the two hypotheses. Getting that out in the open should show this is inevitable. Now, some people will think it's fine to go forward in a ridiculous battle of unimaginable big number likelihood ratios which is where this is headed. But one has to think there are reasonable people who didn't realize this before but for whom it may click in once we're talking about a Google Google's for or against both hypotheses depending on who does what.

In effect, it should collapse from it's own weight.

[_Gadianton]

My thinking is your complaint is inevitable given there aren't any actual, reliable data sets one could use to NOT make assumptions that are going to be align with a persons a priori agreement or disagreemen

another possibility is the model is so messed up that they can't even invent data that consistently supports their conclusion. People could use a correct model and fudge numbers or totally invent numbers, but in this case inventing data that supports a conclusion might be a compliment.

[_honorentheos]

I do think there are a couple of interesting and feasible approaches that could come from their attempt.

The first is realizing that there is a data set of two other books that attempted what the Book of Mormon attempted. It opens the door to having a very small but objectively acquired set of results from which one could identify p values for what a 19th c. author might do if they were attempting to invent a story about the native American origins from the Old World. Setting the Maya question aside, it could be defensible to see what likelihood arises from that comparison that the Book of Mormon was also a similar attempt.

Second, I'm drawn to the idea of going forward in time with the Book of Mormon and comparing it to modern Mormonism rather than the Maya. How likely is it the Book of Mormon actually describes Mormonism? It seems a reasonable set of LDS literature could be compiled and used to show the probability a known authoritative LDS source would state something is defining belief of the faith, convert those to p values, and assess the Book of Mormon success or failure in covering those bases if you will.

But the Dales' paper isn't being done favors by pointing out there is no honest way to come by p values, or increase the data to more than a single comparison between the Book of Mormon and The Maya. If someone didn't figure that out immediately, there isn't a way to show them that will be more clear. Getting Stoopid with the numbers may, but probably not. In any case, it's a bad attempt that can only parent bad attempts.

[_honorentheos]

It appears that Dr. Bruce Dale still wants to focus on the Mayan connections rather than the paper itself. He goes so far as to initially ask that any counter point limit the likelihood ratios to those used in the paper, though he later suggests any value up to 1 is ok.

It seems that Bruce was the source for the apologetics and Brian was the one who formulated the approach. I'm leaning towards Brant Gardner having acted as a peer reviewer for the correspondences while being skeptical of the approach. He's been the primary proponent of each parallel being valid while noting he wouldn't have relied on the statistical method to try and make the case for their strength.

In all seriousness, Billy made a damning observation earlier regarding the assessment of The View of the Hebrews showing their methodology leads to describing a known work of fiction as being strongly correlated with the Mayans. That really should have concluded the discussion and sent the Dales back to rework their paper. It's the most succinct demonstration of the problems with the paper I think is possible and relies entirely on their own work. But Brian's response was the skeptical prior wasn't overcome so, meh. And Bruce's response was a cynical apology for dismissing the VotH with the same degree of prejudice as applied to Manuscript Found when it could have been dismissed with only slightly less prejudice. At that point, it's "Welcome to Westworld!" I do think if this is ever reviewed in the future by impartial, distant observers they will see Billy's point as the obvious encapsulation of what is wrong. It's like reading all of the early debates between critics and apologists and coming across the Book of Abraham issues. Certain points make everything else seem unnecessary. After that, the debate must be seen as continuing either out of inertia or for sport.

[_Lemmie]

One of my main issues has been the problems with defining the denominator of one likelihood ratio as 1, which by definition defines the corresponding one as zero, turning the assigned ratios and their inverses into a bias in favor of the author's position.

Billy Shears put this into words extremely well yesterday, especially in his last paragraph, in a comment on the MI site:

Billy Shears
on May 20, 2019 at 9:35 am said:

Hi Bruce,

You said, “As we examine the evidence, I think it will clarify why Billy Shears is wrong. Our methodology is not biased toward selecting for agreement, as Billy claims.”

Just to be clear, I am using the word “bias” in the technical sense. You could objectively compare the points of similarity between the Book of Mormon and the Maya and still have a very strong statistical bias. You are making a very strong claim here that your methodology doesn’t have bias. It is incumbent upon you to prove it.

You really ought to address the question of why your methodology indicates that in aggregate, there is strong evidence that View of the Hebrews is of ancient Mayan origin. Yes, I understand that if somebody has an arbitrarily high a priori belief against historicity that will be enough to swamp the evidence and maintain disbelief. But why is having a relatively strong a priori prejudice against the Mayan historicity of the View of the Hebrews required in order to disbelieve after looking at the evidence?

Bias inherent in your methodology would explain this. It would also explain why you had to turn to writings outside of The Maya to find most of the specific examples where Dr. Coe doesn’t think the Book of Mormon fits. For example, if there is no evidence that the Mayans had herds, there is no reason Dr. Coe would mention this fact in a book about the Maya. Yet it not being mentioned in that book doesn’t change the fact that herds in the Book of Mormon are an anachronism and should count as evidence against historicity. Anachronisms in the book will systematically not be mentioned in The Maya.Thus the statistical bias.