Rasmussen on Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon

[Lem]

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

The connection was assumed (with good reason

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

Oh, sorry. No, I don’t think so, I didn’t see more about it than what I quoted above.

One thing I learned while looking up a couple of the definitions is this, from wiki:

A similar device, antimetabole, also involves a reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses, but unlike chiasmus, presents a repetition of words in an A-B-B-A configuration.[2]

So at best, inverted TTR, given it depends upon repetition of words for its count, would be a closer but still not verified measure of antimetabole, which seems at best a small subset of chiasmus, while not necessarily being correlated at all with the total chiasmus prevalence:

In rhetoric, chiasmus (/kaɪˈæzməs/ ky-AZ-məs) or, less commonly, chiasm (Latin term from Greek χίασμα, "crossing", from the Greek χιάζω, chiázō, "to shape like the letter Χ"), is a "reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words".[1]

Wiki chiasmus

I am not a linguist, so it would be great to hear from others, but just these starting definitions give pause to taking any of Rasmussen’s assumptions as plausible.

[Lem]

Another piece of Rasmussen’s statistical process is so ridiculous I can’t even imagine how he can mean it seriously.

Regardless, we have what we need to wrap up our analysis.

Before we do, though, we’ll need to consider how to incorporate the findings from the Cranney article, which found that chiasmus and parallelism were much more likely to be found in Book of Mormon texts that would’ve been delivered orally than in its written texts.

The main question here is one of independence—would we expect the frequency of chiasmus in a text (as indicated by the TTR) to be independent of how those texts are distributed within the text? Hopefully this is something on which reasonable people can agree—merely inserting more instances of chiasmus into a text should have nothing to do with putting those instances in the right spots and in the right context—in fact, doing so naïvely might lead to those instances being scattered indiscriminately through the text.

If so, then these two pieces of evidence can be considered to be independent, and we can incorporate that evidence by multiplying the p-value calculated by Cranney (p = .000016) by the p-value for the TTR comparison that we’ve calculated here (p = 3.14 x 10-10). That would leave us with a final consequent probability estimate of p = 5.02 x 10-15.

So, Rasmussen is testing the hypothesis,

”Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon is due to ancient writing patterns and techniques.”

He finds a posterior probability: p = 3.14 x 10*-10.

He then goes to a different (non-Bayesian) study with this hypothesis:

” texts intended for oral presentation [in the B of M] have a statistically higher percentage of parallelized (that is, poetic) material than do texts meant to be read.”

Here are the results of this study, which are UNRELATED to his hypothesis:

I find a relationship that is statistically significant to the 0.000016 level.

In other words, there is less than a 1 in 50,000 chance that this relationship occurred by chance.

Here’s the link to the Chaney paper he is referring to:
https://www.academia.edu/12176915/The_D ... _of_Mormon

Rasmussen’s then takes that p= 0.000016, FROM AN ENTIRELY DIFFERERENT STUDY WITH AN UNRELATED HYPOTHESIS, and incorporates it into his hypothesis results! He simply multiplies it by his results, to get a final, and completely bogus posterior probability that he attributes to HIS hypothesis testing, of p = 5.02 x 10-15.

This little cheat is what boosts his order of magnitude to a 14. Without it, his (still Bogus) results would get him only 9 orders of magnitude change. More than a third of this episode’s magnitude change came from this tacked on nonsense.

Come on. This is ridiculous. Even Peterson has to ask a few questions about the legitimacy of this.

[Gadianton]

So at best, inverted TTR, given it depends upon repetition of words for its count, would be a closer but still not verified measure of antimetabole,

omg, you're right. that has to be it. seriously stunning. I have to give him a little bit of credit for an ingenious disingenuous argument. I almost respect him just a tiny bit more.

I suppose I found Billy's explanations of the recent work interesting also because I had recently (without knowing anything about linguistics I admit) compared the diversity of fist words in sentences between the Book of Mormon and KJV, and there is significantly less diversity in the Book of Mormon.

Maybe more later on that.

[Physics Guy]

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.

Yeah, that's the big problem with this approach. There are lots of other problems that bring in a few spurious orders of magnitude here and there, but that's the big, basic mistake.

[Dr Moore]

Which is more likely?

1) Word repetition correlates to oral dictation of stories and sermons by someone with a limited, Biblically inspired vocabulary.

2) Word repetition correlates to ancientness, due to a high density of Hebraic chiasmus.

[Physics Guy]

I think you must have a point here. Chiasmus is an easy but less obvious way of getting more words out of a few ideas. I mean, it's hard to have more than a few ideas, but they look better if they take up more words. Chiasmus isn't immediately obvious, because people don't remember what you said a few sentences back, so it's a nice way to stretch your ideas. I think you may have a point.

[MG 2.0]

Which is more likely?

1) Word repetition correlates to oral dictation of stories and sermons by someone with a limited, Biblically inspired vocabulary.

2) Word repetition correlates to ancientness, due to a high density of Hebraic chiasmus.

As a layperson without any statistical training I’d go with #2. Having read other things that Joseph wrote, especially his earlier writings, little that we have, I just don’t think he had it in him to sit there and rattle off Chiasmus along with the rather complex narrative going on, the time line, etc.

But carry on. Those are my simple thoughts after a lot of reading and thinking about it. No Bayesian statistics involved.

Just common sense. I hope.

My two cents. Carry on.

Regards,
MG

[Lem]

I think you must have a point here. Chiasmus is an easy but less obvious way of getting more words out of a few ideas. I mean, it's hard to have more than a few ideas, but they look better if they take up more words. Chiasmus isn't immediately obvious, because people don't remember what you said a few sentences back, so it's a nice way to stretch your ideas. I think you may have a point.

And in oral traditions, a great memory device. Stretching things out in this manner keeps you on track, it seems.

[Philo Sofee]

Which is more likely?

1) Word repetition correlates to oral dictation of stories and sermons by someone with a limited, Biblically inspired vocabulary.

2) Word repetition correlates to ancientness, due to a high density of Hebraic chiasmus.

And chiasmus is NOT "Hebraic." This is soooooo ignorant! Chiasmus has been discovered in Akkadian texts, Mesopotamian ones, Greek ones, and Mesoamerican ones. Chiasmus is NOT any one singular bell for one particular kind of language. John Welch the DISCOVERER of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon PROVED it in his book "Chiasmus in Antiquity," which shows chiasmus is not in lockstep or singularly available in only one ancient language, but was used across the entire spectrum of various languages.

[kyzabee]

As I understand it, the Mopologist's claim is that "Joseph couldn't have known about chiasmus."

Actually, if you read my essay closely, my argument's a bit different than how you've framed it. Though I suggest that it's unlikely that Joseph would've known much about chiasmus, I argue that even if he did know something about it, both the frequency and distribution of the chiasmus we see in the Book of Mormon remains unexpected, particularly in comparison to other psuedo-biblical works.

Cheers!