Rasmussen on Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon

[kyzabee]

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

Thanks for the kind words Gadianton!

As for my justification for making that particular leap, my essay series is about doing my best to make informed guesses about the state of the evidence. In this case, the only workable way I saw to make an informed guess was to use something like the TTR, and in doing so I stumbled onto what I think is an interesting observation that I would like to see explored more fully. As Lem suggests, I'm very open about the limitations of that assumption, but I believe it stands as a proxy for the general argument. Not only does the Book of Mormon have chiasmus, but it appears to have way more than we'd expect from a psuedobiblical work. It also isn't distributed in the way we'd expect if it was a general feature of Joseph's writing. I never expected the crowd here to find that particularly notable, but I do, and I think quite a few others might as well.

Cheers!

[kyzabee]

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.

I don't see any particular reason to assume a text's TTR to be correlated with how chiasmus is distributed within that same text. In that case, I think it's reasonable to assume that those two pieces of evidence are independent. If you think you have an argument otherwise, you know where to find me.

[kyzabee]

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

And this is a fair thing to consider, for sure. Could the fact that it's a dictation have anything to do with the lower vocabulary? I have my doubts, and I'll tell you why.

When I'm doing something that requires a bit of extemporizing, like giving a talk, I do indeed repeat myself. But its a repetition of concepts rather than a repetition of words. I say the same thing in a different way. That sort of thing probably serves to increase the talk's total vocabulary, because I have to find different words and phrasing to say the same thing.

You can see an example of what I'm talking about in Brian Hales recent interpreter article, where he provides examples of the repetition used by oral storytellers. Again, you can see repeated concepts, but not really repeated words:

The Borderers began to boast,
What each had done better,
Who had won more duels,
Who had taken a German captive,
Who had broadened the imperial Border;
Who had reared the better horse,
Who had nurtured the better son,
Who had raised the better daughter,
Each said what he wished to.
One praises himself, another his horse,
One his son, and another his nephew.
One praises his dear daughter,
One his daughter, another his dear sister.
One praises his brother’s girl.
All the nobles boast in turn.

In this stanza, you see a few repeated words, like "better" and "praises", but for the most part, in an attempt to extemporize and emphasize the concept at hand, each line adds new vocabulary and new phrasing. You have unique words like "reared", "nurtured", and "raised" all expressing the same idea. This doesn't characterize the repetition you see in the Book of Mormon, or, for that matter, in Leviticus.

It would definitely be interesting to take a look at TTR values for oral works, though, just to be sure!

[Lem]

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.

I don't see any particular reason to assume a text's TTR to be correlated with how chiasmus is distributed within that same text. In that case, I think it's reasonable to assume that those two pieces of evidence are independent. If you think you have an argument otherwise, you know where to find me.

You didn’t actually read my post then? You took a result from a completely different hypothesis and multiplied it by your result, then claimed the resulting number was the final result from YOUR hypothesis!

That’s not even simply bad math, that’s straight up dishonesty that uses bad math. You are cheating, and you got caught.

[Lem]

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

Non-response snipped>

That is quite the mopologetic swerve. Please respond to the actual issues. Here, I’ll repeat the first one for you:

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.

[kyzabee]

Hi Billy! I've missed you! I was worried that COVID might've taken you away like a thief in the night, which would've grieved me deeply.

Your first paragraph is exactly right. In this case, the proxy for chiasmus is the “inverted type-token ratio,” which is used by quantitative linguists to assess the working vocabulary of an author. It is simply the total number of words in a text divided by the number of unique words.

One works with what one has available. And calculating the TTR has the advantage of not taking me several lifetimes to do, which is what it would've taken to accurately count the number of chiasms in the Book of Mormon.

It turns out that the D&C also has a small working vocabulary.

I make note of this, but I also don't make much of it. Maybe it's an indication that repetition is just a part of Joseph's (fake) revelatory process, and maybe it's an indication that the D&C wasn't originally composed in English. But I'm not sure it's an indication of either. The D&C is a different beast than the Book of Mormon entirely. As has been pretty easy to notice this year, the D&C employs quite a bit of apparently stock language when it comes to forming various blessings and mission calls. That sort of thing could quickly decrease working vocabulary, but it's also not something we really see in the Book of Mormon. There you have repetition in the form of chiasmus and parallelism and (often subtle) internal allusions, but you don't really get stock bits of language copied and pasted every other chapter.

Stuff like the D&C is why I think we need a deeper dive into the TTR and what drives it, both in the Book of Mormon and in comparative contexts. My essay may or may not stimulate that kind of effort, but a guy can hope. In the meantime, it serves as a decent barometer for what I see as the probability of Joseph or anyone else in the 19th century giving us the chiastic and parallelistic structures we see in the Book of Mormon.

In Bayesian statistics, you ask “What is the probability you’d see this basket of evidence if hypothesis A is true? What is the probability you’d see this basket of evidence if hypothesis B is true?” In a continuous statistical model, “the probability of seeing this basket of evidence” is given by the height of a probability distribution function (PDF) at a specific point corresponding to the evidence, or by the height of a likelihood function at a specific point corresponding to the evidence.

However, that isn’t what Kyler does. Rather, he consistently uses the p-value from Fisher’s significance testing. This corresponds to the height of the cumulative distribution function (CDF)—not to the height of the PDF.

For anyone not up to speed with what these terms mean, a probability distribution function is a general term for any function that models how likely a set of events are. The cumulative distribution function, on the other hand, is a function adds up a set of probability values for a range of various outcomes. For instance, you could ask what the probability is that someone could have a child that's 6'7". In doing so, you could examine the probability distribution function for height, and then look at the number of children born where were exactly 6'7". That number would probably be pretty low. But it's also probably not the question you really care about. In that case, you really care about the more general question: what's the probability that someone could have a child 6'7" or higher--in other words, instead of asking what the probability is of getting the exact result (6'7"), you're asking what the probability is that you could get a result similar to that (6'7" or above). When asking statistical questions in the social sciences and elsewhere, we generally are asking the latter kinds of questions, and the same goes for my explorations of Book of Mormon evidence. I'm usually asking what are the chances we'd get evidence as strong or stronger than what we see, assuming the book was fraudulent as well as assuming the book was authentic. Chi-squares and t-tests and ANOVAs are pretty good at producing those sorts of probability estimates.

If I'm following Billy here, it seems that he would prefer that I instead produce estimates for the probability of producing the specific results that we see and only those specific results, and that it's somehow inappropriate that I make use of stats that rely on cumulative functions. That would be pretty dumb. In fact, it would probably lead me to engage in the kind of sharpshooter fallacy that he's been accusing me of since the start of this essay series.

Chiasmus is a pretty good example here. If I took the kind of approach Billy suggests here, I could taken a look at the arrangement of Alma 36 and figured out the probability of producing a chiasm with exactly as many levels as we see. That probability would probably be pretty low. It would probably be more fair to the critics though, to estaimte the probability of seeing a chiasm with that many levels or higher, as faithful scholars would probably been crowing just as loudly had that been the case. The cumulative probability function would then spit out a higher probability value, advantaging both the critics and common sense.

In short, Billy's critique here is incorrect (and a bit pedantic). If he would prefer that I use different probability values, he's always welcome to make alternative proposals (though the one he made a couple weeks ago ended up being a bit squishy). Until then, I think my approach works pretty well.

Thanks to Noel for letting me know about this thread (though I'm not in charge of moderating your comment, sadly). If you'd ever like me to comment on something, feel free to let me know.

[Lem]

Rasmussen's recent non-responses here reminded of something he wrote in his Early Modern English episode:

I’m not gonna lie; I have tremendous pity for critics trying to demonstrate the weakness of this particular class of evidence. The skeptical responses I’ve seen so far have done little more than handwave without meaningfully grappling with the full scope of the evidence.

Unbelievable. Many people have made significant responses to the Early Modern English fiasco. He knows this, as he reads and posts here. The responses from our several linguists alone should be addressed, but many of us have also addressed both his and the Carmack/Skousen statistical errors. There is no integrity in this type of mopologetic effort from Rasmussen, or from the Journal where he is posting this. If Rasmussen is not punking his interpreter audience, then at best he is a dishonest and unethical researcher. What a reputation he is establishing for Mormon mopologetic writings.

[Lem]

Your first paragraph is exactly right. In this case, the proxy for chiasmus is the “inverted type-token ratio,” which is used by quantitative linguists to assess the working vocabulary of an author. It is simply the total number of words in a text divided by the number of unique words.

One works with what one has available. And calculating the TTR has the advantage of not taking me several lifetimes to do, which is what it would've taken to accurately count the number of chiasms in the Book of Mormon.

I have highlighted the most dishonest and unethical part of this comment. Recall the reasoning given for using TTR as a proxy, as I posted earlier:

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.

Rasmussen is absolutely wrong in this. Researchers do not "work with what they've got" by using an untested personal assumption, based on NO RESEARCH whatsoever, as though it were factual. If you don't have something to work with, you don't turn to cheating.

I can't even imagine how this is a professional statistician proposing this. Add to that his cheat wherein he adds a third to the magnitude change of his results by multiplying the results of an unrelated hypothesis, and the result is despicable.

In my classes, a student who presented an approach like this in a preliminary group meeting would get some serious advice about ethics. If they went on to present it in class, It would get an F. There is no excuse for this shoddy dishonesty.

[Dr Moore]

One works with what one has available.

This statement presupposes a mandate to project apologetics onto the statistical plane. There is none. None whatsoever. Moreover, pursuing apologetics on a statistical plane will ultimately, I believe, prove not only naïve, but harmful to the belief system you are trying to defend. In short, this is going to backfire horrifically, if it already hasn't.

Kyler, honest scientific researchers know when to say when, and certainly don't publish garbage-out because garbage-in is all "one has available."

I've wasted enough time going back and forth with you, pointing out obvious instances of non-sequitur logic, cherry picking, and of course, your ongoing failure to argue -- even qualitatively -- why multiplication of your point probabilities should be allowed based on a rigorous consideration of why Joseph Smith is not correlated and causal with Joseph Smith across your 23 Bayesian episodic writeups. I even offered to help you out, at the very beginning of all this, sight unseen, by paying for credentialed BYU stats professionals to help you fix some of what I anticipated would be glaring process and methodology problems. Then and each time since, you have done nothing but find cute ways to dismiss legitimate scientific criticism, and somehow turn it into a polemical issue in which the critic must be acting in bad faith toward you, the person of faith. This is now laughable, because in the scientific process of applying Bayes theorem and multiplying probabilities, polemics is the furthest thing from the mindset of careful, honest scholarship.

In another thread, I extended you one more free bit of advice. That is, your project should contain the following disclaimer.

"My Estimating the Evidence project, published with Interpreter, is really just for fun and entertainment among believers, and is not not meant to be a serious scholarly endeavor. My results should not be viewed as a rigorous treatment of a statistical analysis of Book of Mormon truth claims. Even so, I hope you enjoyed my creative writing and my pretty charts."

[huckelberry]

speaking of charts,

reviewing possible results in simple form:

subject . value of support of ancient Book of Mormon per Rasmussen...... per Huckelberry
Page count +3 // . 0
first vision -1 // 0
dictation +5 // 0
DNA -3 // -10
witness +7 // +3
Nahom +2 // +1
transocianic -2 // -2
Early Modern English +20 // 0
King James variants -4 // -4
stylometry +5 // +8
plagiarism -1 // -7
chiasmus +14 // +2
------ // -----
totals +45 // -10

I think different people might estimate the likelihood of things differently. That is probably why I see the numbers differently. I suspect others may not agree with my numbers.

The lack of important native civilizations in the Book of Mormon is touched on with DNA of course but there is important issues in the narrative as well. I think Shulem's map is well more than a joke.It goes a long way to explain the political interactions described in the Book of Mormon. It is possible that DNA deserves a larger negative number than the one I chose.