The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

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_Physics Guy
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Physics Guy »

Open discussion in a neutral forum might be a good idea but I think it's a mistake to start disputing credentials and citing authorities. That gives this paper too much credit.

This paper is not just unimpressive. It's not just debatable on some technical issues. It's completely wrong for a few simple reasons that are not hard to explain.
_Arc
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Arc »

Physics Guy wrote:Open discussion in a neutral forum might be a good idea but I think it's a mistake to start disputing credentials and citing authorities. That gives this paper too much credit.
On second thought, I think you are right (bolding mine).

Physics Guy wrote:This paper is not just unimpressive. It's not just debatable on some technical issues. It's completely wrong for a few simple reasons that are not hard to explain.
Absolutely correct.
"The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things which lifts human life a little above the level of farce and gives it some of the grace of tragedy." Steven Weinberg
_DrW
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _DrW »

Honorentheos was correct. Digging on the paper has resumed over on the Interpreter comments section. This time the "correspondence" has to do with covenants. Bruce assigns a likelihood of 0.02 to the observation that both the Maya and the imaginary Nephites had covenants with their respective deities.
Bruce Dale wrote:According to the weighting scheme used in our article, we view this correspondence as specific, detailed and unusual, for a likelihood of 0.02.
If one is looking for a source from which Joseph Smith could have possibly gotten the idea of covenants for his imaginary Nephites, one need look no further than the Old Testament. Given the amount of material that Joseph Smith copied, some of it pretty much word for word, anachronisms and all, from the KJV of the Bible, the fact that he mentions covenants in his historical novel that he couldn't copyright in Canada is not surprising - its expected.
Bruce Dale wrote:What do you think, commentators?
This "commentator" thinks that Bruce should reconsider and pull the paper. The hole is only getting deeper.
David Hume: "---Mistakes in philosophy are merely ridiculous, those in religion are dangerous."

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_I have a question
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _I have a question »

DrW wrote:Honorentheos was correct. Digging on the paper has resumed over on the Interpreter comments section. This time the "correspondence" has to do with covenants. Bruce assigns a likelihood of 0.02 to the observation that both the Maya and the imaginary Nephites had covenants with their respective deities.
Bruce Dale wrote:According to the weighting scheme used in our article, we view this correspondence as specific, detailed and unusual, for a likelihood of 0.02.
If one is looking for a source from which Joseph Smith could have possibly gotten the idea of covenants for his imaginary Nephites, one need look no further than the Old Testament. Given the amount of material that Joseph Smith copied, some of it pretty much word for word, anachronisms and all, from the KJV of the Bible, the fact that he mentions covenants in his historical novel that he couldn't copyright in Canada is not surprising - its expected.
Bruce Dale wrote:What do you think, commentators?
This "commentator" thinks that Bruce should reconsider and pull the paper. The hole is only getting deeper.


Billy shows everyone just how deep it is...

Analysis: The concepts of “covenants” might be specific and detailed, but they are not unusual. The Bible is about God’s covenant people. If somebody familiar with the Bible were writing fiction about how God led some people to a new land, you would fully expect them to talk about Biblical covenants. So this isn’t the least bit unusual. But even if “covenants” are incredibly specific and detailed, that doesn’t indicate that a Bayesian likelihood ratio should be anything other than 1.00. Somebody writing speculative fiction about a Biblical people would in all likelihood include covenants in his fiction. Thus, this detail fits in with the “it was made up” hypothesis just as well as the “it is ancient Mesoamerican” hypothesis. This point illustrates how fundamentally flawed your “specific, detailed, and unique” scoring system is.
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.” (Mathew Syed 'Black Box Thinking')
_aussieguy55
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _aussieguy55 »

Jenkins told me regarding his colleague. "I did, but he could not be persuaded that it was worth spending much time giving a detailed response. He basically said the methodology was garbage and should not be applied to problems like that, but as I said, no great details."
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_DrW
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _DrW »

aussieguy55 wrote:Jenkins told me regarding his colleague. "I did, but he could not be persuaded that it was worth spending much time giving a detailed response. He basically said the methodology was garbage and should not be applied to problems like that, but as I said, no great details."

This is exactly what Lemmie and other qualified critics on this board have stated. Then they (especially Lemmie) went on to provide not only details of the problems but examples of how many of the problems could be addressed.

Unfortunately, as many on this board, and from other sites, have stated; the Dale & Dale paper is beyond redemption. Here is a recent statement regarding the paper by a physics professor working in Germany.
Physics Guy wrote:This paper is not just unimpressive. It's not just debatable on some technical issues. It's completely wrong for a few simple reasons that are not hard to explain.

The fact that these fatal problems have been repeatedly and clearly pointed out to the Dales and the Interpreter, both here and in the Interpreter comments section, leaves one to wonder what it will take to have the paper withdrawn.

Do the Dales and the Interpreter really want to leave this absolutely ridiculous garbage on the internet as a monument to their lack of professional and personal integrity (manifest here as ignorance and stupidity) when it comes to setting up hypotheses and the application of simple math and statistics?

Harsh words? Perhaps. Worse would be not calling out this ongoing train wreck. As Physics Guy has noted upthread, everyone makes mistakes now and then. Honest people make an effort to correct those mistakes when they are pointed out.
Last edited by Guest on Tue Jul 16, 2019 11:12 am, edited 4 times in total.
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_honorentheos
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _honorentheos »

The latest correspondence is yet another example of Dr. Bruce claiming that the mere reference to a concept in The Maya serves as a strong connection to a practise in the Book of Mormon. But if one then looks at the actual practise being described in The Maya, there couldn't be less similarity between the two.

In this case, the so called covenant is referencing religious mythology and rituals among Maya that are tied to the belief humankind was created from maize dough, and are granted blessing by the gods but in exchange must give their bodies to the deities including acts such as penis piercing and blood letting.

From that, Dr. Dale has decided the very Christian act of taking on Christ's name through baptism is unusual, specific and detailed as far as matches go. Umm, sure?
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Analytics »

You didn't see the penis piercing covenant in the Book of Mormon? Obviously you need to read it another hundred times. If you'll agree to do so, I'll send you a free copy.
It’s relatively easy to agree that only Homo sapiens can speak about things that don’t really exist, and believe six impossible things before breakfast. You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

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_Lemmie
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _Lemmie »

Analytics wrote:You didn't see the penis piercing covenant in the Book of Mormon? Obviously you need to read it another hundred times. If you'll agree to do so, I'll send you a free copy.

:lol: the elder Dale does seem quite obsessed with counting the number of times he has read something through, does he not?

I don't understand that at ALL. In the end, after a learning process, technically one may have "read through" something multiple times, but that is definitely only a side effect of the actual learning, and certainly not what one would announce as both necessary and sufficient evidence of understanding.

Maybe that is why the Dale's analyses of their correspondences seem so artificial. If the correspondences are based on just 'reading through' and apparently finding words that match, then their conclusion that it is a correspondence is, by definition, superficial. There doesn't seem to be any other explanation for why they use such tenuous connections to define a correspondence, unless their starting conclusion that the Book of Mormon is true is so strong that they are subconsciously forced to find associations when there is no academic basis for doing so.

And again, if that is the case, adequate peer review should have assisted them in correcting that bias.
_honorentheos
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Re: The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

Post by _honorentheos »

It's becoming apparent that Dr. Dale is not that familiar with the cultural environment of Joseph Smith given many of his correspondences appear to him as impossible to explain outside Smith was working with authentic Mayan source material in the golden plates. His view that covenants as seen in the Book of Mormon were not evident in the US Presbyterian worldview is otherwise inexplicable. From the pilgrims to the founding fathers there was a view America's destiny was founded on covenants including the idea America itself represented a covenant nation from which our manifest destiny is founded. It's what feeds the conservative rights view of the US as being founded as a Christian nation despite God not being in the Constitution and national religion explicitly considered a threat to state rights. But one can only do so much to help point out such glaring blindspots.
The world is always full of the sound of waves..but who knows the heart of the sea, a hundred feet down? Who knows it's depth?
~ Eiji Yoshikawa
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