The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Gadianton]

If Dr. Dale fancies himself a scholar and considers his Interpreter paper a scholarly work, then he should act like a scholar and take responsibility for his nonsense in the real world of scholarship.

Surely taking responsibility would include making sure the Interpreter paper is included on the publication list attached to his resume, as well as being cited on his Google Scholar page.

If the paper really is the blockbuster that K. Magleby claims DCP and his colleagues at the Interpreter believe it to be, who knows, perhaps it could turn the whole discipline of Mesoamerican history on its head.

if it keeps getting promoted with utter blindness to the criticism then it may get stuck one way or another.

how is it possible that this is even happening?

Well, the way I see it, it's easy to side with the truth, assuming the market of ideas is relatively free. Believing something because it's true is like researching the strongest football team and then picking that team to be your favorite team. In terms of in-group loyalty, that's cheating. Real loyalty is demonstrated when backing the unthinkable, as we're seeing with this paper. The comments Tom quoted are so over the top, they go beyond ignorance and shameless promotion, and I think cross into the realm of flat out lying. We've already seen some shilling in the comments section that ironically, the Bayesian fake review software mentioned by the Dales themselves would weed out. There is dishonesty going on there, and also in the way the article is being advertised by certain people who know better. But that's just it -- shameless promotion with knowledge identifies dishonesty, but it also signals commitment to the cause. If you want your stock to go up in the world of Mopologetics, this is the very kind of thing worth your time to stand your ground upon and lie through your teeth about.

When I was a priest, a very careful and anal Bishop used to remind us that sin didn't just cover sins of commission, but also sins of omission. To the extent there really were statisticians who peer-reviewed this paper, that either they haven't got with wyatt or wyatt with them and reconsidered and publicly disclosed, demonstrate there's some serious sin of omission going on here. Of course, it's for the Lord, so if lying for the Lord really is a virtue, then they might get an extra planet out of the in the eternities.

When I was at BYU, the Paul H. Dunn controversy broke out, and my Book of Mormon teacher mentioned it casually as something inappropriate to discuss. He did mention he knew that it had been going on for 10 years. It didn't hit me until later that if he knew, probably a boatload of others did, and for decades nobody did anything about it; let it ride.

I'd say for those sitting on the fence in the world of Mopologetics, now is as good a time ever to switch sides, if honesty is a matter of personal importance to you.

[_I have a question]

I’m beginning to think the Dales are wolves in sheep’s clothing...they have done a fantastic job of proving Dr Coe right.

[_Lemmie]

Bruce Dale brings up another correspondence, but a commenter notes that in doing so Dale has changed the initial hypotheses, and quite rightly points out that a discussion of that is more appropriate:

Jared Manning
on June 10, 2019 at 12:32 am said:

It’s hard to take seriously your claim that “the Book of Mormon has ‘little to do with the early Indian cultures’” is the hypothesis the paper is testing.

This statement appears in the very last paragraph of the paper in the concluding statements. This relates to your conclusion based on the analysis but is demonstrably not the hypothesis being tested (notwithstanding the statements in the abstract and opening paragraph). It’s important we don’t confuse the hypothesis being subjected to Bayes’ with the conclusion (or with pre-existing beliefs).

The most direct statement of the hypothesis in your paper says:

The hypothesis (the question of interest to us) in this analysis is the factual nature of the Book of Mormon. The question of interest is: “Is the Book of Mormon a work of fiction, or is it a factual, historical document according to the cumulative, relevant evidence summarized in The Maya?”

I will quibble a little bit with the second sentence (above) because it is not an exhaustive converse hypothesis since the Book of Mormon could be a factual book set in a location other than Mesoamerica. But I think the first sentence alludes to an appropriate dichotomy occurring many times throughout the paper where you set up a fact or fiction choice for the Book of Mormon that doesn’t specify a location. For instance:

Pieces of evidence in favor of the hypothesis, that is, that the Book of Mormon is false…

and

Points of evidence in favor of the essentially factual nature of the Book of Mormon (called the converse hypothesis)…

This hypothesis/converse hypothesis IS exhaustive (putting aside for now the possibility it could be a mixture of fact and fiction). I think the paper got off to a good start as far as this issue is concerned. The problem comes when the hypothesis gets reduced from “the Book of Mormon is false” to “Joseph made it up.” And the converse hypothesis gets reduced from “the Book of Mormon is factual” to “the Book of Mormon is factual and occurred in Mesoamerica.” The hypothesis and converse hypothesis tested are subsets of the appropriate, exhaustive ones identified earlier in the paper and therefore not exhaustive in and of themselves.

Returning now to the claim that “the Book of Mormon has little to do with early Indian cultures” is the hypothesis being tested, I ask: What is the converse hypothesis? Where do you identify the converse hypothesis in the paper? Why are there two sets of hypotheses/converse hypotheses in the paper?

I realize you would rather discuss the merits of the particular claims made in the paper, and frankly, so would I. I am not as antagonistic to the truth claims of the Book of Mormon as I have surely come across as (my fault completely). But I think it’s appropriate to discuss methodology since so much of the paper hangs on how it has been applied.

[_Lemmie]

Honorentheos goes on to post probably the most cogent argument in this thread against the Dales' methodology:

Honorentheos on June 10, 2019 at 12:49 am said:

I recall this being brought up previously. My comment then, from May 12th:

Concern 1: The skeptical prior is overcome automatically by simply finding and adding correspondences. The approach taken inevitably overcomes an arbitrarily determined likelihood that the Book of Mormon is fiction.

Given your methodology and the assigned likelihood ratios, if you were to assign all 131 of the correspondences the weakest probability it was based on knowledge rather than a guess (0.5 or a 1 in 2 likelihood), one only needs to propose a small handful of weak correspondences to overcome what you present as a strong skeptical prior. As you pointed out in your section on sensitivity analysis, that number appeared to be 17.

Concern 2: The correspondences selected to achieve the results did not need to demonstrate actual correspondence to be included.

The paper does little if anything to demonstrate the methods for identifying the criteria derived from The Maya for each correspondence and stating them in a way that could be used to determine if the Book of Mormon contains an objectively mapped corollary to be evaluated.

Who sets up an experiment where you cherry pick only positive data points, and then argue that your experiment "proves" that positive data points outweigh negative data points?!

[_Lemmie]

Honorentheos continues making his point:

[Concern 3: The methodology constrains what Coe described as characteristics that applied to the Maya to things you believe serve as hits or misses.

Using your chosen example above, 3.12 Existence of opposites, could be discussed under concern 2 above, noting that dualism generically is found in most cultural creation myths and used to explain the universe for obvious reasons. Night/day, darkness/light, sun/moon, birth/death, growth/decay, summer/winter, planting/harvest, action/reaction, Yin/Yang, inhale/exhale, creation/destruction – human societies find paired opposites inherent in creation and have created narrative mythologies to explain them across continents and millennia. Eastern religions have these cycles deeply embedded in them. And its part of the Hebrew creation mythology that God the creator ordered the heavens and the earth, with a greater light ruling the day and a lesser light ruling the night, male and female created He his living creations. Cosmic dualism, or the idea that there is a war between good and evil, is also embedded in post-exilic teachings and was behind Cyrus the Great liberating the captive Hebrews when the Persians concurred the Babylonians. As a Zoroastrian, his concern was with good combating evil at cosmic scales. Yet what the Maya tz’ak describes is more of a two-sides required to have a coin concept. Of the items listed in 2 Nephi by the speaker, Lehi (a pre-exilic Hebrew if one accepts the book as history), the examples are philosophical concepts. Not natural pairings as listed in the excerpt from The Maya.

This raises multiple questions, not least of which is if it really deserves to be considered a “hit”? It’s inclusion as such is entirely contingent on your interpretation of it being one. And as noted in concern 1, accumulating only a handful of supposed hits no matter how tenuous would overcome the skeptical prior. If the methodology for determining something is a hit is essentially subjective, where does that leave the paper?

[_Lemmie]

Bruce Dale is clearly in over his head as he asks today for a response to correspondence 3.12. Maybe Billy Shears is reaching the end of his patience with this nonsense, or maybe this just seemed the right correspondence to shut down the Dales totally, but in any case his response is devastating.

First the correspondence:

Existence of opposites is an essential part of creation

Coe’s standard: “A relevant Maya term from these ceramics is tz’ak, the idea of ordering. A key part of creation was the establishment of opposites. These are presented in alternative spellings for the tz’ak glyph. … The exquisite Tablet of the 96 Glyphs … lays out a long series of such opposed pairs. It begins with sun and night, followed by possibly life and death, then Venus and moon, wind and water” (p. 251).

Book of Mormon correspondence: See 2 Nephi 2:11‒15.

Analysis of correspondence: The words “create” or “creation” are used six times in these five verses in the Book of Mormon, all in the context of opposed pairs (wickedness/holiness, good/bad, life/death, corruption/incorruption, forbidden fruit/tree of life, sweet/bitter and so on). Counting verse 10, the words “oppose” or “opposition” are used four times..

And the response:

Billy Shears on June 10, 2019 at 11:42 am said:

Hi Bruce,

The Book of Mormon verses you cite speak of the concept of opposition (not opposites). In context, what it is saying is that to bring to pass the purposes of their monotheistic God, there needs to be tension between things—good and bad, wickedness or holiness, sin and righteousness, happiness and misery. If this tension wasn’t there, all things would “compound into one” and be “as dead, having no life neither death.”

For the Maya, opposites have to do with cause and effect rather than enduring tension. Just as the Book of Mormon lists several things that are in opposition, The Maya lists several things from a glyph that are opposites. Some of them are obvious: sun and night, life and death, lady and lord. Other opposites are more obscure: Venus and moon, wind and water, green growth and harvested crops, sky and earth, cloud and rain, stingray spine and blood.

If one generalizes these two concepts to the point they are a match, is there any religion that wouldn’t be a match, too? If opposition in the Book of Mormon is the same thing as opposites in The Maya, isn’t it also the same thing as Yin and Yang in Eastern religion, order and chaos in Zoroastrianism, the unity of opposites in ancient Greek philosophy, the light side and dark side of the force in Star Wars, the proletariat and the bourgeoise in Marxism, etc.?

While it might be fair to say that Book of Mormon opposition and The Maya opposites have something to do with each other, the correlation is superficial and was cherry-picked from a section of The Maya on religion that depicts a religion that does in fact have little to do with the protestant Christianity described in the Book of Mormon.

To do a reasonable Bayesian analysis on this point, all of the similarities and differences between Mayan religion and the Book of Mormon religion would need to be considered. An analysis in aggregate would show that Coe was right—they have little to do with each other.

[_Gadianton]

To do a reasonable Bayesian analysis on this point, all of the similarities and differences between Mayan religion and the Book of Mormon religion would need to be considered. An analysis in aggregate would show that Coe was right—they have little to do with each other.

If Dale disagrees, let's see his math that shows otherwise. So far Billy has been doing all that math. Wasn't there another Dale who chimed in on that thread, who appeared to be a stats guy and showed up just to dis a Late War derail? Why doesn't he make himself useful and help out his comrade?

[_honorentheos]

Bruce raised the latest correspondence once before about a week after the paper was published. It was met with criticism then which he said he'd come back and address.

In that light I think Billy and others are justified in being a bit fed up with Dr. Dale's version of absurdist theater that the comment section has become.

[_Arc]

Bruce raised the latest correspondence once before about a week after the paper was published. It was met with criticism then which he said he'd come back and address.

In that light I think Billy and others are justified in being a bit fed up with Dr. Dale's version of absurdist theater that the comment section has become.

Honorentheos, you have certainly done your part over on the Interpreter comment section to highlight the Dale debacle for what it is. You have done very well, especially considering you are working outside your main area of expertise. Your criticisms reflect the perspective of many of us who may not be experts in Bayesian Inference, but clearly understand how unfounded and outrageous the narrative and claims of the Dale paper really are. If only there were a more like you willing to take the time and tell the truth.

[_Lemmie]

A Cautionary Letter to My Friends:

Well, here I am in Vegas, having the time of my life! I met someone last night who I really think is the luckiest person in the entire world.

Let me explain. I first saw him about 1 am, at the roulette table. Later he told me he had been playing Roulette since he got there, around 8 pm. Anyway, I watched him guess a number... and win! What are the odds? Well, just over 2%, according to my "Newbie's Guide to Vegas." Can you believe it?

The next night I went to a show- by myself, my new friend wanted to practice his roulette luck. Well, I met up with him around midnight, just in time to watch him play 4 numbers and win--not once but twice! The odds on that are about 10%, so not as amazing as his win the night before, but then--get this.

On his very next bet, he played Red, and also won! That's about 50/50 odds, but still, right after his 2 other wins? Amazing, right?! I went to bed right after that, but my friend stayed playing Roulette.

This morning, my friend found me at the brunch buffet. I have to say, he looked a little beat, but he said he was up all night playing games, so I can understand.

Anyway, here's my dilemma. My new friend needs to borrow $80,000. I know that's a lot, but he promises he will return it double by tonight. "Remember me and my wins? I'm the luckiest winner you've ever met, so it's not even a risk!" Then he said we can meet up at 8 pm tonight, and that doubling my money will be "the surest bet in the Casino!"

Well, I am thinking hard about this. What are the odds that he won FOUR TIMES this weekend? Each of those wins was totally unrelated to any other win, right? I mean really, what are the odds someone would win four times in a single weekend of gambling? So, if the wins are all independent, I can multiply their probabilities...

.02 x .1 x .1 x .5 = 0.0001.

That means there is only ONE chance in TEN THOUSAND that my friend managed all four wins! I remember reading somewhere about prior odds... before I got here this weekend I would have thought it would be 100 to 1 against a guesser turning out to actually be a... well, a "knower," I suppose!!

Anyway, if I multiply my prior odds by the odds of the four totally independent wins, I get... 0.0001 x 100 = 0.01 or 1 one-hundredth.

So, if i recall correctly what I read in the Interpreter about updating my posterior odds, that means that I now believe that the odds are ONE HUNDRED TO ONE that my new friend "knows" what bet will win at Roulette!

Well, I am off to the bank, there is no way I can pass up odds like this. It will totally use up all of my savings and max out every credit card I have, but since I'll be putting twice that amount back tomorrow, I can live with the high interest rates! (I will tell you that one of the Casino workers overheard my friend talking to me at brunch, and on the way out, she whispered in my ear something like, "ask him how many bets he...." then I didn't hear the last word. It was something like "bossed?" or "cost?" or maybe "lost?" but I don't really know.

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. I am confident my math is correct, and besides, I got it out of the Interpreter. I am taking into account all the information necessary to determine how good a guesser my new friend really is. Or should I say, KNOWER? Hah hah!!

I mean really, what are the odds I have found the one and only 'Knower' among all the 'Guessers' in Vegas?! I would say, "wish me luck!" but I don't really think I need it.

Yours Truly,

.........................