PageRank Logic and Apologetics

[_Gadianton]

The logic of internet search engines raise interesting questions about about how authority works. The goal of a search engine is to objectively find sites that are authorities on various subjects. The first search engines looked for the number of times keywords appeared on a page when searched for. This worked to an extent. The problem is, legitimate authorities don't always yell the loudest while this is never a problem for the shams.

Apologists are fond of announcing their scholarliness ad nauseum. They love to brag about the number of books they've read, who they're reading now, and the essays they've presented at their conferences with hundreds of footnotes. By the logic of how often scholarly terms appear in their communications, the names of scholars are dropped and so on, Mopologetics would be one of the most serious academic institutions on the planet.

Larry Page, the founder of Google, formalized the simple intuition that it doesn't matter how often you talk about something, it matters how often other people who talk about that something talk about you. His PageRank system drastically increased the quality of discovering legitimate authority in a web search and it made him a billionare. Extending this logic to the problem of apologetics, if any secular Egyptologist were to cite Gee as having provided a substantial body of evidence for the existence of the Book of Abraham, it would be worth more than all the footnotes of every paper delivered at a FAIR conference combined.

It's hard for a website with no legitimacy to climb the ladder of success. For instance, a new website with essentially nothing to offer, would be inclined to do things like plaster the page with keywords. As noted, apologists plaster discussions with important sounding citations. In the case of the web, Google can actually penalize a websites rank for this, and likewise, cautous critics see the overdropping of names and books as desperation by the apologists, as hot air with no substance. New websites with nothing to offer but striving for importance can get together and link to each other, if hundreds of people are linking to them, then that must mean they're important, right? Well, if those hundreds of people are also nobodies, then no, it doesn't help. Further, by creating "link farms" where a bunch of nobodies work together to make themselves important, PageRank will again penalize ranking as it figures out the circles. Likewise, it matters almost nothing at all that there are several apologetic organizations that all promote each other hoping for the appearance of a legitimate scholarly community. It buys them no credibility whatsoever that they've been engaged in their research for 40 or 50 years or more and have written 5 million papers. In fact, that they have done this and are still ignored, as Joey points out, reduces their credibility to virtually nothing.

While the apologists get heated and equivocate on a regular basis about their legitimacy in acadamia, hoping critics will be dumb enough to buy into it, deep down they know they've got nothing. And like a website with a questionable product, they realize their only hope is to dump money into big advertising campaigns. For the right price, legitimacy might be bought, but for the Mopologetic product, the entire church could liquidate and not bring in a single customer.

So what they have to do is work the sidelines. The peripheral issues. Funding a Mormon chair at Claremont, buying the Yale conference, translating Islamic texts -- all these paid advertisements seek for minimal recognition. They'll never get a "Your Book of Mormon archeology has become impressive and convincing", but they might get a "Mormon theology if cast in the right light may have some similarities to X, which professor so-and-so at Claremont has ben working on." And this would be a tremendous victory. These little steps of social networking, taking potential customers to lunch and so on, is their last hope of getting some kind of recognition of importance.

Everything up to this has been an abject failure in Mopologetcs, a self-congratulatory exercise everyone sees through. But if these new tactics work, in several years Mormonism might be seen as at least as valid as other religions. And, it's very possible that as such efforts gain traction, Book of Mormon geography and Book of Abraham studies will become embarrassing, a hinderance, and slowly fade out of popularity among the future Mopologetic body.

[_Ray A]

Mutton dressed up as lamb immediately comes to mind.

[_Doctor Scratch]

This post is staggeringly important. I would add on only one detail: the FARMS Ziggurat. As you'll know doubt recall, Dr. Robbers, FARMS had begun to amass millions of dollars in an effort to solidify its superficial credibility. They had been so successful in their fundraising campaign, in fact, that the Church itself stepped in to intervene.

But, let's get real: how much legitimacy would actually be gained simply by having a ziggurat-shaped building on the BYU campus?

[_Gadianton]

But, let's get real: how much legitimacy would actually be gained simply by having a ziggurat-shaped building on the BYU campus?

About as much as Scientology gains by building museums with e-meters in glass cases on display, encyclopedias, and futuristic-looking art.
A single paper published in a legitimate phsychiatric journal refrencing any idea of Hubbard's as important for understanding any aspect of the human psyche in the smallest way would be worth more than a thousand such buildings as far as credibility goes.

[_CaliforniaKid]

An interesting analogy, Gad. Thanks.

[_harmony]

So... how many papers on Egyptology cite Dr Gee's Book of Abraham apologetics as revelent and valid?

[_Gadianton]

Thanks Chris!

Well, there should be some relevance to this line of inquiry since PageRank is based on [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_analysis]Citation Analysis[/u].

[_Gadianton]

Harmony,

This is a tricky question and is often phrased such that it immediately gets a "Traditions in Abraham" answer.

As I've explained before, there are various tiers to apologetics. Gee puts a lot of time into tier two apologetics, which is simply to do regular Egyptology in his normal course such that it lays the groundwork for apologetics he'd like to accomplish. I'm sure he's had some success here. Of course unquestionably, there has never been a citation of his tier 3 work for its sake as an apologetic. Having tier two success is nothing to sneeze at, it's a huge accomplishment. I'm just pointing out the existence of tier one and two apologetics is the result of the dismal failure of tier three.

[_Doctor Scratch]

But, let's get real: how much legitimacy would actually be gained simply by having a ziggurat-shaped building on the BYU campus?

About as much as Scientology gains by building museums with e-meters in glass cases on display, encyclopedias, and futuristic-looking art.
A single paper published in a legitimate phsychiatric journal refrencing any idea of Hubbard's as important for understanding any aspect of the human psyche in the smallest way would be worth more than a thousand such buildings as far as credibility goes.

I couldn't agree more. Then again, I don't think that Scientology---believe it or not---is sailing through waters that are as treacherous. The Scientologists have to defend their e-meter stuff, sure, and they constantly have to deflect attacks saying that they are a cult. Then there is the psychiatry stuff. Beyond that, though, they aren't trying to prove a whole mountain of things for which there is no evidence. Frankly, I think the LDS apologists have got a much tougher job.

[_EAllusion]

I don't think you are familiar with Scientology's understanding of the history of the world, then.