Rasmussen on Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon

[Lem]

This episode 13 on chiasmus resulted in a magnitude change of 14 in the direction of belief in the Book of Mormon as an ancient text. This is a breathtaking result, and is in second place for pieces of evidence that result in a magnitude change toward belief. The only piece of evidence stronger, according to Rasmussen is the magnitude change of 23 for the Early Modern English results. Interestingly enough, however, there are no comments...

Given this extreme result, it is interesting to note the actual source of Rasmussen's conclusion, posted after the conclusion, in "The Skeptic's Corner" section:

Since I’m the first person to mess around with the idea of using the TTR as a proxy-measure for chiasm and parallelism, it goes without saying that these results are tentative and exploratory.

So, making a linguistic argument he hasn't seen anyone else make, while not being a linguist.

This comment though, is just inexcusable:

The biggest limitation here, though, is the lack of an explicit connection between the TTR and the actual amount of Hebrew poetic structures in the text. The connection was assumed (with good reason) but not actually measured. A validation study that actually tries to count the number of poetic structures and correlating that with the TTR would be a vital step here, though it would take work that I didn’t have time for and likely will never have available.

So, he ASSUMED a connection he did NOT MEASURE, then after testing something else, concluded that the connection he ASSUMED was indeed there, and therefore, that pre-assumed conclusion supports a belief in an ancient Book of Mormon.

I cannot even conceive who would not see these comments by Rasmussen as the most ridiculous, nonsensical way to approach a statistical study. Was there a name given for the statistician who supposedly reviewed Rasmussen's work?

I am with Billy Spears on this. I think Peterson and the Interpreter Journal are being punked.

[Philo Sofee]

And to think, all Peterson has to do is edit... I genuinely find Interpreter going down the toilet with its thorough lack of any actual sophisticated or even validating realistic scholarship anymore. How desperate he must be to have this kind of tripe on his site? Just wow.

[malkie]

This episode 13 on chiasmus resulted in a magnitude change of 14 in the direction of belief in the Book of Mormon as an ancient text. This is a breathtaking result, and is in second place for pieces of evidence that result in a magnitude change toward belief. The only piece of evidence stronger, according to Rasmussen is the magnitude change of 23 for the Early Modern English results. Interestingly enough, however, there are no comments...

...

As you note, Lem, after 3 days there is not a single comment - where are the cheering crowds?

Or perhaps, since the critics are not engaging on the Interpreter/Coconut Grove site, nobody really cares enough?

"It’s really true how nothin’ matters
No mad, mad world and no mad hatters
No one’s pitchin’ cause there ain’t no batters
In Coconut Grove"

[drumdude]

To help visualize how insanely large 14 orders of magnitude is - 10^14 is the estimate for the number of stars in the largest known galaxy.

All the grains of sand on the world’s beaches are 10^21. Which is still 2 orders of magnitude lower than Kyler’s assertion about Early Modern English.

10^-16 is the chance of rolling snake eyes 10 times in a row. You would have to throw the dice every second for 100,000 years to have a decent chance at accomplishing this feat. This feat is somehow comparable in improbability to Joseph Smith working in a known biblical literary technique into the Book of Mormon.

Put more directly- if Joseph Smith wrote a random novel every second for 1,000 years he would only be expected to have one of those novels contain a chiasmus.

Is it surprising we are done talking about this nonsense?

[Physics Guy]

Probably the only way to make people like Rasmussen see the fallacy of their approach is to get them to use it for making some judgements in everyday life. They'll reach conclusions with insane overconfidence, because that's what the method inherently does, but on practical everyday matters it will be clear that many of these absurdly confident conclusions are totally wrong.

Pick a neutral topic that isn't as important to Mormon apologists as Mormon apologetics, a topic about which they have no strong prior convictions. I'm optimistic that the tendency to astronomical confidence will suddenly seem suspicious, rather than wonderful, even to them. Without the blinders of apologetic zeal, they'll be quick enough to spot the silly fallacies that make it seem so impossibly certain that, say, the Cubs will win the World Series this year, or that Texas will elect a female governor next.

So I'd hope, anyway.

[Lem]

Probably the only way to make people like Rasmussen see the fallacy of their approach is to get them to use it for making some judgements in everyday life. They'll reach conclusions with insane overconfidence, because that's what the method inherently does, but on practical everyday matters it will be clear that many of these absurdly confident conclusions are totally wrong.

Pick a neutral topic that isn't as important to Mormon apologists as Mormon apologetics, a topic about which they have no strong prior convictions. I'm optimistic that the tendency to astronomical confidence will suddenly seem suspicious, rather than wonderful, even to them. Without the blinders of apologetic zeal, they'll be quick enough to spot the silly fallacies that make it seem so impossibly certain that, say, the Cubs will win the World Series this year, or that Texas will elect a female governor next.

So I'd hope, anyway.

This is a great point. I’ve thought about something like this also, as a way to explain the problem with him assuming that each of his 23 experiments are independent, which is allowing him to multiply the probability results, or equivalently, add up the changes in orders of magnitude. It completely changes the results when the dependency across experiments is accounted for.

[Gadianton]

I finally read this thread and I'm blown away. I didn't think it was possible for KR to break the stupid meter anymore than he's already broken it.

if someone has the explanation handy, can explain his justification for linking:

the inverted type-token ratio measures how much chiasmus is present in a book

[Dr Moore]

I finally read this thread and I'm blown away. I didn't think it was possible for KR to break the stupid meter anymore than he's already broken it.

if someone has the explanation handy, can explain his justification for linking:

the inverted type-token ratio measures how much chiasmus is present in a book

Yep. May as well invent a metric, like % of words beginning with the letter “z” as a proxy for something, as a proxy rarity, as a proxy for ancientness. Stupid GIGO porn.

[Lem]

I finally read this thread and I'm blown away. I didn't think it was possible for Kyler Rasmussen to break the stupid meter anymore than he's already broken it.

if someone has the explanation handy, can explain his justification for linking:

the inverted type-token ratio measures how much chiasmus is present in a book

You may be asking that rhetorically, but he certainly has no legitimate justification for it.

Given this extreme result, it is interesting to note the actual source of Rasmussen's conclusion, posted after the conclusion, in "The Skeptic's Corner" section:

Since I’m the first person to mess around with the idea of using the TTR as a proxy-measure for chiasm and parallelism, it goes without saying that these results are tentative and exploratory.

So, making a linguistic argument he hasn't seen anyone else make, while not being a linguist.

This comment though, is just inexcusable:

The biggest limitation here, though, is the lack of an explicit connection between the TTR and the actual amount of Hebrew poetic structures in the text. The connection was assumed (with good reason) but not actually measured. A validation study that actually tries to count the number of poetic structures and correlating that with the TTR would be a vital step here, though it would take work that I didn’t have time for and likely will never have available.

So… 14 orders of magnitude change toward belief, based on his starting assumption, with NO actual explanation or justification on why he assumes there is a connection.

[Gadianton]

no, not rhetorical, I really want to know the answer.

The connection was assumed (with good reason

To put my question a different way: Did he give the "good reason" for assuming the connection?