The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Analytics]

It seems like they are incapable of grasping that a major alternative hypothesis is that the book is a 19th century fictional history based on contemporary mound-builder myths and local religious beliefs written in the genre biblical pseudoepigraphia….

Bingo. My favorite "correspondence" illustrates this perfectly:

3.2 Strong Christian elements in Maya religion

Coe’s standard: “Many Colonial-period Maya identified the risen Christ with the Maize God” (p. 71). “The raised wooden standard shall come! … Our lord comes, Itza! Our elder brother comes. … Receive your guests, the bearded men, the men of the east, the bearers of the sign of God, lord!” (p. 227). “There was … a great deal of … blending between Spanish and Maya religious institutions and beliefs, since in many respects they were so similar” (p. 289).

Book of Mormon correspondence: From the title page to the last chapter, the Book of Mormon is, as it claims to be, another witness that Jesus is the Christ.
[Page 126]

Analysis of correspondence: In both books, the correspondence is specific, detailed and very unusual. Why would Joseph Smith have “guessed” that the ancient Mesoamericans had strong elements of Christianity in their religious practices? View of the Hebrews claims to find ancient Hebrew elements among American Indian tribes, but not Christian elements. So this is specific, detailed and unusual.

Likelihood = 0.02

[Guest]

DrW, truer words were never spoken. I often have older graduate students (lawyers, politicians, bankers, historians, etc.) who have had established and successful careers, but who are, nonetheless, somewhat new to certain aspects of the technicalities of statistical analysis. The smart ones get themselves into a project group with at least one savvy millennial (or an old woman like me )with the math and stats background, and they LISTEN and LEARN. They contribute their best, but they never stop the math geeks from contributing their best.Those groups succeed.

But when I see an older student insisting that their way works and yes of course they understand probability, but there's NO WAY their common sense is wrong, then I know I have a group that's going to have trouble.

I'm sensing that the Elder Dale might fit that category.

Regarding problems with certain Elders, this morning our team is putting the finishing touches on two documents that will be used to publicly and professionally refute a paper and a blog post written by an overzealous elder environmentalist who claims to be a Ph.D. engineer - and whose published conclusions and claims are demonstrably dead wrong.

This old guy appears to be experienced but has clearly failed to keep up with the literature. As a consequence, he has made a fool of himself in public with these two publications. This would be of little interest to us except that his nonsense directly contradicts the existence of environmentally beneficial technology that we have invented, developed and are commercializing.

When our staff saw the offending blog post, they were concerned. When we saw the associated paper, we considered that clients or potential stakeholders may see his published nonsense and decide to act accordingly. Realizing that this author's misinformation and false claims could be in the literature for time and all eternity (or at least a few billion years), we decided to expend the effort to refute his sloppy work. We did so because we understand the damage that apparently credible but uninformed or misguided "professionals" can do to the reputation of emerging technologies. We needed to do what we could to prevent or minimize such damage.

The Interpreter should do no less. Like our other Ph.D. engineer friend on the internet, Dr. Bruce Dale has made a fool of himself. He should voluntarily withdraw the Interpreter paper.

Alternatively, if the Interpreter is truly the organ of scholarship that it claims to be, then it should be willing to publish a properly peer reviewed paper, authored by qualified and credentialled individual(s) who can set the record straight with regard to the false claims made by Dr. Dale.

As a faithful Mormon on the MAD Board has stated, sloppy work, falsehoods and misrepresentations, even if intended to help strengthen the faith of believers, do more harm than good in the long run.

[_honorentheos]

Helpful new comment from Canopy -

Canopy
on June 27, 2019 at 3:26 pm said:

“Let’s try another explicit, open analysis, using very optimistic probabilities of both steps, this time 95% for each step: 1) Joseph Smith did know what you assume he knew, and 2) he knew he should include that fact in the Book of Mormon. (To be clear, I think the probability that Joseph Smith did know what you assume he knew was actually very, very small…not 95%)

Calculate 0.95 x 0.95 = 0.90. Raise 0.90 to the 131st power equals about 1 in a million.”

I wish you were this explicit when estimating the probabilities that make up the Bayes factors in your paper, because your above calculation exhibits the same kind of problem that several of us have been pointing out:

1) The 131 items that you included in your calculation were chosen by you specifically because they were included in both the Book of Mormon and The Maya.
2) You propose, optimistically, that each item had a 95% chance of being included in the Book of Mormon (assuming Joseph Smith knew about them).
3) You find significance in the fact that all 131 items were included in the Book of Mormon, considering the low probability (1/1000) of this happening.

I trust you see the problem. As is typical with statistical analyses, yours was done on a sample of the overall corpus. What is not typical is that your sample was selected deterministically, and you’ve made no attempt to show that your selection criterion didn’t introduce bias.

I would bet good money that you (the authors) are quite intelligent and honest. But, like all of us, you have blind spots. If I were involved with The Interpreter, I would be disturbed that the reviewers didn’t catch this particular blind spot.

[_Arc]

I would bet good money that you (the authors) are quite intelligent and honest. But, like all of us, you have blind spots. If I were involved with The Interpreter, I would be disturbed that the reviewers didn’t catch this particular blind spot.

As Canopy was too polite to point out, this particular blind spot, plus a number of other problems described by Canopy, honorentheos, Billy Shears and others on the Interpreter comments pages, completely invalidate the conclusions of the Dale & Dale paper, rendering it, as Dr. Bruce Dale exclaimed in one of his responses, "nonsense".

DP (DCP, who is involved with the Interpreter) should take some responsibility for the reputation and integrity of the journal and find some kind of fix here.

Leaving the paper as it is shows a great disrespect for Interpreter readers who don't know any better. The Dale & Dale paper has become a standing joke for those who do. At more than 22,900 page views on this critical thread alone, it seems to be providing a lot of entertainment, and no doubt some enlightenment, for the latter.

[_Gadianton]

The problem is, Arc, a falsehood like this one, so transparently so and epic that it is rightfully called a lie, was forged in the blindest of good intentions, and therefore becomes a kind of sacrifice that makes for a strong rallying point. An apologist with a bit of math sense who gets behind it demonstrates loyalty in a way that is difficult to match by any other means. When I was a freshman at BYU, I had a Book of Mormon teacher with a theology degree from Harvard, a big jolly guy with a boatload of charisma, who taught us point blank -- in the context of the Laban story -- that if the prophet were to tell us to kill someone, we should do it, and be blessed for it, independent of whether the request was founded in a real command from God.

Now thinking about that scenario in a way that I'm sure my teacher wouldn't have considered: is it not true that the greater loyalty is demonstrated when the command is false, and quite obviously so?

[_Physics Guy]

If one pea in ten is really a green pebble, then the chance of getting 131 random peas without a single pebble among them is low, but if the cook picks out all the pebbles before serving your peas then the odds of getting a plate with no pebbles are not low.

That's Canopy's point, but I think it might be optimistic to expect Dale to see it, because I think Canopy muffed it a bit. This time Dale's fallacy isn't even about how the Dales carefully selected supposedly Mayan-related features from the Book of Mormon.

This time Dale's mistake is to take no account of how Joseph Smith carefully picked out of the Book of Mormon all the Mayan factoids that he either didn't know or didn't want to use, before serving the Book of Mormon to us. This was a lot easier for him than picking out greenish pebbles from peas, because things that aren't included in the Book of Mormon are by definition not included in the Book of Mormon.

Speaking for myself in my own field at least, I have to admit that even experts can sometimes make mistakes that, like this last one by Dale, are so superfluidly dumb that you can't even realize right away how absurdly dumb they are. If you can avoid noticing that level of dumbness over a year of peer review, though, that's a whole other story.

[Guest]

Rule #1 when you are in over your head: Stop digging!

Please be patient…I have some good stuff to add.

Sigh

I can hardly wait.

Until the entire problem statement, hypotheses generation, and mathematical operations applied are done properly, anything added (with the exception of a notice of retraction) would just be more nonsense in the context of the paper.

[_I have a question]

Rule #1 when you are in over your head: Stop digging!

Please be patient…I have some good stuff to add.

Sigh

I can hardly wait.

Until the entire problem statement, hypotheses, and mathematical operations applied are somehow fixed, anything added (with the exception of a retraction) would just be more nonsense in the context of the paper.

I’m currently pondering which was the bigger self-inflicted calamity - the Dales paper, or Hamblin/Jenkins...it’s a dilemma. FTR, I hope Interpreter steadfastly keeps the paper up, and that the Dales keep responding.

[_Arc]

I’m currently pondering which was the bigger self-inflicted calamity - the Dales paper, or Hamblin/Jenkins...it’s a dilemma. FTR, I hope Interpreter steadfastly keeps the paper up, and that the Dales keep responding.

The Mopologetic equivalent of an unexploded 500 pound bomb from WWII under the streets of London.

[_I have a question]

I’m currently pondering which was the bigger self-inflicted calamity - the Dales paper, or Hamblin/Jenkins...it’s a dilemma. FTR, I hope Interpreter steadfastly keeps the paper up, and that the Dales keep responding.

The Mopologetic equivalent of an unexploded 500 pound bomb from WWII under the streets of London.

...that they keep jumping up and down on.