The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Res Ipsa]

Yeah, Analytics, that was another howler. The fact that 1000 later some Mayans tried to reconcile their religion with Christianity totally makes up for the absence of any evidence of Christianity at the relevant time.

[_Res Ipsa]

But, a Lemmie, time doesn’t matter because evolution of cultural ideas and... and... other reasons ... and stuff.

[_Analytics]

thanks for your diligence on this topic!
k

You're welcome, K!

Dale on the correspondence, 3.15, which kairos referred to above. This one is weighted at 0.02:

Bruce E. Dale on June 5, 2019 at 5:52 pm said:

My thanks to all those who are weighing in on the article. Here is another correspondence between Coe’s book and the Book of Mormon that I would like to offer for your consideration. Evaluating this one requires spending some time with Mosiah Chapters 1-6 in the Book of Mormon.

Ritual for the renewal of the community, including transfer of sacred objects.

Coe’s standard: “The entire religious drama is directed toward renewal of the universe and of the community, and ends with the transfer of the sacred objects of office to a new set of cargo-holders” (p. 295).

Book of Mormon standard: See Mosiah Chapters 1‒6.

Analysis of the correspondence: By reading these six chapters carefully we observe:
• King Benjamin’s gathering of his community to the temple for a “religious drama” including speaking (chanting) in unison,
• complete with community-wide, covenant-making with God,
• by which the community was renewed (and received a new name as part of the renewal)
• at the same time King Benjamin transferred his kingly office to his son Mosiah, the new cargo holder,
• along with multiple sacred objects.

Taken together, the ritual that unfolds in Mosiah chapters 1-6 is a very strong fit with Coe’s standard for a ritual renewing of the community. I know of no possible model or contemporary practice in Joseph Smith’s day that he could have reasonably drawn upon to describe King Benjamin’s gathering of his people.

Bruce

And Billy Shears' quite devastating reply, which starts by noting that the quote Bruce Dale uses to equate ancient Mesoamerican culture with Book of Mormon stories dated only up to 400 AD, is a description of religious traditions of a contemporary group:

Billy Shears
on June 6, 2019 at 9:44 am said:

A few thoughts on this:

The Maya

The quote from The Maya is from Chapter 10, “The Enduring Maya.” This chapter describes what the Maya is like today, nearly 500 years after the initial conquest began. It says, “the various Maya groups have clearly assimilated and altered many disparate foreign, and even threatening, elements to fit their own cultural patterns inherited from the pre-Conquest era.”

The specific quote is talking about the contemporary religious traditions of the Tsotsil Maya of Zinacantan. They associate the sun with “Our Holy Father” and with Jesus, and the moon with the Virgin Mary. They also worship their ancestors, the earth itself, and the Catholic saints. They have a complicated religious hierarchy consisting of 61 distinct positions on four levels occupied by about 250 “cargo holders.” Each position has a sacred religious object which is kept by the person holding the office during the one-year term that he holds it. They have an abiding concern with rank, and each office has a financial burden you have to pay while holding the office—as you rise in the hierarchy your burden increases, so that if you make it to the top you “can expect to retire a poor but highly honored individual.”

Every January they have large celebrations in honor of (the Catholic Saint) St. Sebastian, where they have dramatized ceremonies where they impersonate monkeys, jaguars, “blackmen”, and Spaniards. The rituals are directed towards renewal of the universe and the community, and end with the transfer of the sacred objects of office to the new office holders.

King Benjamin
King Benjamin was a king, and when he got old he had a singular tent revival with his people to announce that he was passing his throne to his son Mosiah, and gave him the plates of brass, plates of Nephi, sword of Laban, and Liahona. When the people gathered they brought the firstlings of their flocks to perform sacrifices according to the law of Moses. The people brought their tents, and King Benjamin erected a tower to speak from. A theme of the speech was that King Benjamin didn’t tax the people, but rather served them. The people entered into a covenant to obey God.

Analysis
The Tsotsil Maya of Zincantan have large annual religious gatherings. King Benjamin had a singular gathering. The Tsotsil’s ritual is about the renewal of the universe and the community. King Benjamin’s singular ritual was entering into a covenant to obey God. The Tsotsil’s ritual includes passing on sacred objects associated with each of the 250 positions in the 4 levels of the hierarchy of religious of shamans to the new holder of the objects for the next one-year term. Before the big formal meeting began, Benjamin passed on some sacred objects to his son, who was going to be king for life.


In short, there are religious gatherings and ceremonies in both the Book of Mormon and in contemporary Mayan life. In that sense, this does count as a something that the Mayans and the Book of Mormon have in common. However, the vast majority of the details between the two ceremonies are different, and there isn’t anything that the Mayas do that can best be explained as being somehow connected to the Book of Mormon. Likewise, none of the details of King Benjamin’s tent revival are uniquely Mayan.

The few points of similarity are general and superficial, and this doesn’t count as evidence in favor (or against) the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

Likelihood Ratio: 1.00.

Dale's advice to carefully read Mosiah needs to include a reminder to himself to carefully read Coe.

It occurs to me that Bruce's methodology would only be half as bad if he changed the scoring so that you only got a 0.02 if a correspondence was specific, detailed, unusual, and the specific details themselves actually matched.

[_Lemmie]

It occurs to me that Bruce's methodology would only be half as bad if he changed the scoring so that you only got a 0.02 if a correspondence was specific, detailed, unusual, and the specific details themselves actually matched.

[_Lemmie]

It seems that Brant Gardner is walking a very fine line here. He wants to support the Book of Mormon conclusions, but he's clearly not a fan of the Dale's approach.

[responding to Jared,]
Brant A. Gardner on June 6, 2019 at 8:12 am said:

...I have no expertise in statistics. I use different methodologies. However, one that I try to avoid is parallelomania, where parallel lists become the basis of the analysis.

As in the parallelomania of multiplying 131 parallels to get the result that the Book of Mormon is true?

continuing:

...In this case, you have a long parallel list, but the conclusion you draw that the Book of Mormon more resembles classical antiquity is the result of the very methodological problem you are suggesting for the article. It is a list based on a selected set which generates the parallels rather than discovers them.

It's worth noting that Jared's "long parallel list" was Appendix A, Correspondences 1-131. And yes, the Dales used a "selected set," "generate[d]" from Coe's book, via the requirement of being mentioned in both books. By definition that does not discover all ideas that the two books had or did not have in common, but rather it generates a list of only positive correspondences, and limited by common words. It's a biased method.

At this point, I simply want to clarify that your conclusion does not flow from the data you present, but only from the way in which it was presented.

No argument there, Brant! And since the Dales seem insistent that people note they added 18 negative correspondences, i'll point out that those 18 were also not only artificially generated but also most egregiously cherry-picked.

And by cherry-picked, i mean not all the negative correspondences Coe has mentioned were even included. From the Dale's paper:

Near the end of Podcast #907, Dr. Dehlin invited Dr. Coe to unburden himself about anything that Coe thought should be in the Book of Mormon, but is not. Dr. Coe mentions four things: the absence of (1) books, (2) chocolate, (3) turkeys, and (4) jaguars.

These, however, were simply discarded as negative correspondences, because:

...As for chocolate, turkeys, and jaguars, the Book of Mormon does not claim to be a text on elite foods, poultry, or exotic wild animals...Knowledge of turkeys, jaguars, and consumption of chocolate among the ancient Mesoamericans is of no real worth.

That's the absolute definition of cherry-picking one's data. Leaving those out of the analysis for the author's reasons is just bad statistics. It's inexcusable. But to continue with Brant's comment:

The applicability of the statistical examination in the paper is for someone else to examine.

Actually, the statistical applicability of the paper should have been for the peer reviewer to examine. Surely a reviewer would have noted that the authors stated outright that they arbitrarily left out data that should have been included. Statistical review should also have noted the bias toward positive correspondences in the methodology.

[_Lemmie]

Billy Shears again addresses a problem with the way the Dales are thinking about the concepts of probability and hypotheses underlying their attempted use of Bayesian factors.

To set the stage, Bruce Dales argues that a guess should be considered "unusual," but NOT on the basis of the Book of Mormon/The Maya facts, as his own setup requires he should. Instead, he introduces another book:

Bruce E. Dale on June 3, 2019 at 2:25 pm said:

...Regarding your earlier comment about having a calendar with a starting year, month and day not being unusual, I think I have not been clear enough why I believe it was unusual....

Rev. Smith’s book specifically states (see pg. 184 of our article) that the Indians that Joseph Smith knew had no name for a year. But the Maya and the Nephites clearly did understand what a year was, and they measured time by day, month and year. The North American Indians clearly did NOT measure time this way.

Thus if Joseph Smith had taken his ideas of calendaring from what was “in the air” among the Indians, as represented by the ideas in Rev. Smith’s book, Joseph would have gotten this point spectacularly wrong.

Billy responds to the facts, but quickly gets to the bigger issue:

Billy Shears on June 4, 2019 at 9:59 am said:

....Regarding dates, let me use this as an opportunity to illustrate the problem with using a probability space that doesn’t exhaust everything that may have happened.

Evidence

Before Jesus was born, the Book of Mormon uses dates exactly the same way that the Old Testament does—counting years, months, and days since significant events happened (e.g. Exodus 12:41, 2 Kings 15:1, Jeremiah 25:1). After Jesus was born, the book switches to the anno Domini system of counting dates from the time of Jesus’ birth. This was always done in solar years, and is always thought of as a time line.

In contrast, the Mayans thought of times in circles. The Mayans simultaneously kept track of multiple cycles: they had 260-day counts, 365-day vague years, and “Great Cycles” of the “Long Count” system which are cycles of 1,872,000 days. In all of these cycles, the new cycle begins when the previous one ends—they never counted from when an event happened.

Hypothesis 1: Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon and “guessed” how Mayans thought of time based on View of the Hebrews

As you explained, this make no sense.

Hypothesis 2: The Book of Mormon is an authentic, Mesomamerican document

The Mayans had calendars and the Book of Mormon has calendars, so this is a “hit.” However, the nature of the calendars were very different—(one counted solar years in a line from a few different significant events, the other is a set of never-ending cycles of days), since the nature of their calendars and their perception of time were so different, both having calendars is only a superficial hit.

If those are the only two possibilities that could happen, then Hypothesis two wins out, I guess.

However, there is a third hypothesis:

Hypothesis 3: Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon and thought about time in the way the Old Testament describes time, and in the way he naturally thought about it, having been steeped in the Gregorian system

This third hypothesis fits the evidence perfectly and if it is included in the analysis, dramatically changes the result.

Honorentheos clearly pointed out the issue as well:

Honorentheos on June 3, 2019 at 9:58 pm said:
While there are those skeptical of the fantastical version of the Book of Mormon authorship who may insist it came from Ethan Smith, most I know including commenters in this thread see Smith using the Bible as his source for describing the Nephites. The Lamanites/Native Americans had lost all civilization according to the prevailing theories that informed the Book of Mormon. Of course Smith wouldn’t look to them for descriptions of the civilized, Hebrew Nephites. That source was the KJV mingled with frontier folk-Christian beliefs.

Note also that when Dale brought in the other book so the guess could be considered "unusual," he didn't actually address the issues Billy Shears brought up.

[_Lemmie]

As far as i can tell, no one has addressed this MAJOR anachronism in the Book of Mormon:

It’s worth pointing out that counting years with year 1 BC set as the year Jesus was born is known as the “Anno Domini” system, and was invented by the monk Dionysius Exiguus in the year AD 525. It is a huge anachronism that the Nephites started using the Anno Domini system at least 516 years before Dionysius Exiguus invented it; it was used from as early as AD 9 and was used continuously until the end of the book in AD 421 (See 3 Nephi 2:8 and Moroni 10:1). This is convenient for modern readers, but not in any way Mayan.

Other arguments are equally inconsistent. When things don't match well, the argument is

Brant A. Gardner
on June 4, 2019 at 10:22 am said:

....In the particulars of calendrics, we are dealing with a text in translation, and translated by a non-Mesoamerican expert. I wouldn’t expect terminology to line up....

But when there seems to be a match, suddenly the terminology is an amazing fit. For example:

What possible model or contemporary practice could Joseph Smith have drawn upon to describe King Benjamin’s gathering of his people so perfectly?

and

In a word, how did he “guess” this one?

and

It is one thing for Joseph Smith to have “guessed” the existence of the Lehite colony, but to correctly guess another much, much earlier culture/migration is quite unusual.

and

So the correspondence is specific, detailed and unusual. It seems very unlikely that Joseph Smith would have correctly “guessed” this particular word.

etc, etc, etc.

So misses are justified as normal errors due to the lack of expertise by an editor, but supposed "matches" are lauded as demonstrating astonishing expertise by an author. The statistician who peer reviewed this has a lot to answer for.

[_Gadianton]

Thanks for the updates, Lemmie. The apologists are very lucky to have Billy Shears to correct their atrocious reasoning with such finesse. They should be paying him big consulting dollars for his time. I'm learning a lot from Billy, and boy, it really makes me want to up my game when I read his explanations for things. It's amazing the SeN commenters just call him names and aren't the least bit appreciative. They should really apologize for this behavior. At least at Interpreter they are civil to him, even if they don't get it.

Brant's apologetic is what we've come to know -- textual layers. But he's begging the question when he asks why? because there's no reason to just assume loose translation and textual layers. And I wonder if he's being consistent: given loose translation, why wouldn't the Dale's superficial parallels be hits? They don't have to be be very convincing hits, but they could in fact be hits of the Billy Shears 1.0 variety that do not sway one way or another. Where can you draw the lines on loose translation and say, this glaring anachronism over here is due to Joseph Smith's limited knowledge, but this superficial parallel over there isn't valid at all? Why can't that superficial parallel also display the limited ability of Smith? Had his abilities been greater, the hit would have been more detailed. I can't see any difference between the two. Softening the blow of a big miss isn't any different than exaggerating the connection of a minimal hit.

[_Lemmie]

Where can you draw the lines on loose translation and say, this glaring anachronism over here is due to Joseph Smith's limited knowledge, but this superficial parallel over there isn't valid at all? Why can't that superficial parallel also display the limited ability of Smith? Had his abilities been greater, the hit would have been more detailed. I can't see any difference between the two. Softening the blow of a big miss isn't any different than exaggerating the connection of a minimal hit.

Perfection. Bias is bias.

[_Lemmie]

The topic of this post has left me pretty angry. So far, I've given my own assessment of the math and reviewed comments left by others, but this correspondence has left me almost speechless. I'll categorize this one as intellectual dishonesty.

Correspondence 5.10 states:

Precious stones exist (but they are not diamonds, rubies, and pearls)

The Dale's assessment:

Analysis of correspondence: Bruce Dale, the son of a mining engineer, grew up in mining towns in Nevada and Arizona, and was an avid rock hound in his youth. For him, this is a particularly powerful correspondence. Both the Maya and the Book of Mormon people had precious stones, which represented great riches to them (Alma 17:14). So this correspondence is specific.

It is also unusual in the details not given in the Book of Mormon. If Joseph Smith “guessed” the Book of Mormon, he would very probably have guessed “precious stones” to be the only precious stones he knew of, namely diamonds, rubies, and perhaps pearls. But Mesoamerica has no rubies at all, nor does it have any significant diamond resources. (Mexico has a few small, inferior diamonds, but no diamond mines.) Joseph Smith would not have “guessed” the precious stones to be jade, obsidian, turquoise or calcite. Nor would the names of those stones have meant anything to all but a very small fraction of those who read the Book of Mormon. (Cureloms and cumoms, anyone?) But Joseph Smith made neither mistake. He (or rather the Book of Mormon authors) simply called them, quite accurately, “precious stones.” We rate this likelihood as 0.02.
Likelihood = 0.02

This part is important: So if "Joseph Smith “guessed... he would very probably have guessed 'precious stones' to be the only precious stones he knew of, namely diamonds, rubies, and perhaps pearls....But Joseph Smith made neither mistake. He (or rather the Book of Mormon authors) simply called them, quite accurately, 'precious stones.' "

The Dales rate this as a LR= 0.2.

But take a look at the scripture used to support this claim: Alma 17:4:

And assuredly it was great, for they had undertaken to preach the word of God to a awild and a hardened and a ferocious people; a people who delighted in murdering the Nephites, and robbing and plundering them; and their hearts were set upon riches, or upon gold and silver, and precious stones; yet they sought to obtain these things by murdering and plundering, that they might not labor for them with their own hands.

Now, elsewhere in the paper, "gold and silver" is listed as a negative correspondence, a wrong guess on Joseph Smith' part, because, as Coe stated:

Coe’s standard: “there were no sources of gold and silver in the Maya lowlands” (p. 22).

However, in this correspondence, even though the five words "gold and silver, and precious stones" are in the quote, the Dales argue that because Joseph Smith did NOT define the precious stones incorrectly, this is a positive correspondence of the highest order. EVEN THOUGH SMITH STATED TWO ELEMENTS THAT DID NOT EXIST IN THE MAYA AT THE TIME, when he mentioned "gold and silver, and precious stones."

This one just makes me sick to my stomach. The level of intellectual dishonesty in the Dale's analysis for this correspondence is profound. How can one, in good conscience, make this argument?

Again, peer review at the Interpreter has failed. It is extremely difficult to imagine a competent statistician NOT noticing these issues during review.