Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

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DrStakhanovite
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

Post by DrStakhanovite »

This afternoon I decided to return to Daniel’s post and check out the comments to see what has developed. While scanning the conversations, I remembered that Daniel had a brief interest in the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer (as seen here and in particular here); Daniel was utilizing remarks from the first handful of pages from Gadamer’s ‘Truth and Method’ to undercut “scientism” and militate against its acceptance.

On the surface, this is a pretty plausible approach for Daniel to take. Gadamer is arguing at length about the Humanities obsession with “method” and the epistemological implications of such positivism. Yet, if Daniel had just made the simple effort of reading the first seventeen pages of the book, he’d have encountered a very troubling passage relevant to Daniel’s entire mopologetic career:
Gadamer wrote:At the same time it is self-evident that it is not mathematics but humanistic studies that are important here. For what could the new methodology of the seventeenth century mean for the human sciences? One has only to read the appropriate chapters of the Logique de Port-Royal concerning the rules of reason applied to historical truths to see how little can be achieved in the human sciences by that idea of method. (p.17)
A little context: “Logique de Port-Royal” is a reference to one of the most widely read books on philosophical logic in Western history and is only eclipsed by the likes of Aristotle and Gottlob Frege. In English we call it the ‘Port Royal Logic’ because the book is attached to the Jansenist movement at the Port Royal Abbey in France. I should mention that the Port Royal Abbey and the Jansenist movement play a central role in Blaise Pascal’s life and Pascal probably made direct contributions to the text of ‘Port Royal Logic’; for someone who invokes the name and works of Pascal as often as Daniel does, you’d think he’d have been blogging about what comes next:
Gadamer wrote:Its results are really trivial—for example, the idea that in order to judge an event in its truth one must take account of the accompanying circumstances (circonstances). With this kind of argument the Jansenists sought to provide a methodical way of showing to what extent miracles deserved belief. They countered an untested belief in miracles with the spirit of the new method and sought in this way to legitimate the true miracles of biblical and ecclesiastical tradition. The new science in the service of the old church—that this relationship could not last is only too clear, and one can foresee what had to happen when the Christian presuppositions themselves were questioned. When the methodological ideal of the natural sciences was applied to the credibility of the historical testimonies of scriptural tradition, it inevitably led to completely different results that were catastrophic for Christianity. There is no great distance between the criticism of miracles in the style of the Jansenists and historical criticism of the Bible. Spinoza is a good example of this. I shall show later that a logically consistent application of this method as the only norm for the truth of the human sciences would amount to their self-annihilation. (p.17)
I think it would be compelling reading to see Daniel let up on Gemli and spend some time actually engaging what Gadamer said, because the man is quite confidently asserting that Daniel’s entire ‘Witness’ project and his recent foray in NDE’s is doomed for intellectual failure.

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Moving on, I found this comment by “tangata neneva” to be interesting:
tangata neneva wrote:I think the authors may have confused “convincing” (which is a personal willingness to accept) with confidence (which is a formal statistical construct). I am going to assume that what they really mean is that convincingness is an “effect size” and not an assessment of confidence. (In other words, I would say something like I am 95% confident that this line of evidence is 90% convincing or in 100 groups of 100 people each, I can expect on average 90 people in a group will be convinced in 95 of the groups). (Dr Rasmussen, help!)

For integrating multiple lines of evidence, typically (at least in my world), a weighting process for each line of evidence is used to account for all the supporting factors a line of evidence might provide (confidence, study size, precision, predictiveness, proportion of gemli-ness, etc.). This is often done through a meta-analysis where the overall effect (the overall convincingness) is a pooling of all the lines of evidence accounting for all the other influencers. Dr Rasmussen’s analysis of multiple lines of evidence for the Book of Mormon is an awesome example of a classic Bayesian stepwise approach to weighted meta-analysis.

But in general, there approach is on track - a simple approach, and crude, but on track.
There isn’t much I’d complain about here, though I think it is worth mentioning that Confidence Intervals are categorically the wrong type of statistical inferences to be making in the context Daniel is speaking of and nearly diametrically opposed to the kind of Bayes employed by Kyler Rasmussen.

Speaking of which:
Kyler Ray Rasmussen wrote:TN hits the high points here. I agree that they aren't providing a particularly coherent definition of "convincing", but that doesn't mean that one wouldn't be possible. It would take some more detailed thinking and a methodical review of the evidence, but I suspect one could build a reasonable (if imprecise) set of estimates similar to the ones I put together in my blog series. To work, they each would have to estimate the probability of observing that line of evidence, both under the conditions of a (1) a valid afterlife, and (2) an alternative naturalistic hypothesis, with anoxic brain states probably being the best contender.
What kills me is the breathless naïvété here. Since the time of Rene Descartes, some of the most brilliant and powerful minds in European history have sought to prove the existence of God, miracles, angelic beings, and the after life, using the methods of mathematics. None of them achieved any real success and their failures are still studied in minute detail today.

There is so much material on the subject from just the past 10 years that directly relates to what they are trying to achieve and they don’t mention any of it whatsoever. It is as if they never bothered to research any of this and just pull out their old textbooks on statistics for the social sciences, assuming they are the first people ever to broach the topic.

I know I shouldn’t be surprised anymore, but mopologetics is a much lower effort than even Christopher Hitchens and I’m having trouble comprehending how they got to this point.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

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DrStakhanovite wrote:
Sun Sep 18, 2022 9:58 pm
Moving on, I found this comment by “tangata neneva” to be interesting:
tangata neneva wrote: For integrating multiple lines of evidence, typically (at least in my world), a weighting process for each line of evidence is used to account for all the supporting factors a line of evidence might provide (confidence, study size, precision, predictiveness, proportion of gemli-ness, etc.). This is often done through a meta-analysis where the overall effect (the overall convincingness) is a pooling of all the lines of evidence accounting for all the other influencers. Dr Rasmussen’s analysis of multiple lines of evidence for the Book of Mormon is an awesome example of a classic Bayesian stepwise approach to weighted meta-analysis.
Kyler Ray Rasmussen wrote:TN hits the high points here. I agree that they aren't providing a particularly coherent definition of "convincing", but that doesn't mean that one wouldn't be possible. It would take some more detailed thinking and a methodical review of the evidence, but I suspect one could build a reasonable (if imprecise) set of estimates similar to the ones I put together in my blog series. To work, they each would have to estimate the probability of observing that line of evidence, both under the conditions of a (1) a valid afterlife, and (2) an alternative naturalistic hypothesis, with anoxic brain states probably being the best contender.
Tangata is wrong about the meta-analysis stuff, and Kyler should have corrected it because he knows better.

Setting aside the purported awesomeness of Kyler's Book of Mormon project, it is absolutely not amenable to meta-analysis. In meta-analysis (MA) you are pooling a bunch of effects that all examine the same relationship of interest between two variables. If you are interested in the overall effect of X on Y, then all Xs must be the same conceptual variable, and all Ys must also be the same conceptual variable.

The math porn project doesn't work here because it's A ==> Book of Mormon is true, B--> Book of Mormon is true, C ==> Book of Mormon is true, and so on. Each line of "evidence" is totally different from the next (quite apart from the non-independence question, which is also required in meta-analysis, where effects are averaged instead of (cringe) multiplied), so you can't just lump them all together. It's the classic 'apples to oranges' error. Anyway, whatever it is, it ain't meta-analysis.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

Post by Philo Sofee »

Dr. Stak
tangata neneva wrote:
I think the authors may have confused “convincing” (which is a personal willingness to accept) with confidence (which is a formal statistical construct). I am going to assume that what they really mean is that convincingness is an “effect size” and not an assessment of confidence. (In other words, I would say something like I am 95% confident that this line of evidence is 90% convincing or in 100 groups of 100 people each, I can expect on average 90 people in a group will be convinced in 95 of the groups). (Dr Rasmussen, help!)

For integrating multiple lines of evidence, typically (at least in my world), a weighting process for each line of evidence is used to account for all the supporting factors a line of evidence might provide (confidence, study size, precision, predictiveness, proportion of gemli-ness, etc.). This is often done through a meta-analysis where the overall effect (the overall convincingness) is a pooling of all the lines of evidence accounting for all the other influencers. Dr Rasmussen’s analysis of multiple lines of evidence for the Book of Mormon is an awesome example of a classic Bayesian stepwise approach to weighted meta-analysis.

But in general, there approach is on track - a simple approach, and crude, but on track.
There isn’t much I’d complain about here, though I think it is worth mentioning that Confidence Intervals are categorically the wrong type of statistical inferences to be making in the context Daniel is speaking of and nearly diametrically opposed to the kind of Bayes employed by Kyler Rasmussen.
Oh good! There for a second I thought you had found nothing wrong with Rasmussen's use of Bayes. I found his conclusions entirely predetermined (as I had predicted) and he did nothing even maybe close to examining all the lines of evidence in order to arrive at his statistical conclusions, which made his materials an entire farcical affair. He ignored mountains of materials in order to arrive at what ended up being, unfortunately for him, entirely phony research. And he systematically did so, which is why I never bothered to continue reading his stuff after the 5th or 6th item. It was obvious what he was doing, well, erm... except for his apologetic cohorts. Dr. Moore has exquisitely identified what this is - apologetic porn.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

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DrStakhanovite wrote:
Fri Sep 16, 2022 5:23 pm
I think people get seduced by the use of algebra because it gives the impression of objective detachment, precision, and rigor.
It's a common experience as a PhD student in theoretical physics to find a page of elegant, LaTeX-typeset derivations, simply lying around the office on a desk somewhere, that happens to be about exactly your own project and is giving wonderfully clear results. Five excited minutes later you realize that it's your own old notes from two months ago and completely wrong. The "TeX effect" just makes it look so authoritative that you nod your head in impressed agreement even when it's idiotic and you wrote it yourself.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

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To be clear, Kyler’s math porn blog series errs not only on the topic of statistical independence (as discussed upthread). The project is riddled with motivated reasoning, cheery picked data, and superficial treatment of “evidence,” even going so far as to invent positive evidence out of clearly negative evidence, only to fit the narrative (Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon, e.g., his single strongest evidence score in favor of ancient true record).

The most glaring errors are the obvious non sequitur arguments presented to “interpret” certain data. For instance, Kyler argues that a long book >> true ancient record, which is an absurd conclusion (esp when considering the amount of plagiarized biblical material).

In another case of compounding bad scholarship, comprising one of his 2 highest evidence scores, the so-called “trajectory of evidence” is brought forward. This one was late in the project, so didn’t get much airtime. Kyler actually argues that apologists’ ability over time to “eliminate” some entries from a list of supposed Book of Mormon anachronisms (foxes guarding the henhouse, cough cough) qualifies as overwhelming evidence in favor of historicity. Like, we had 120 before and now we have just 40. And whaddyaknow, odds of 120 anachronisms is so much worse than only 40 anachronisms, so if you take the delta probability, it's like winning the PowerBall jackpot twice in a row. And then he actually counts that apologist-audited delta probability in favor of the Book of Mormon, despite the simple truth that one anachronism is devastating.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

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Dr Moore wrote:
Mon Sep 19, 2022 3:11 pm
To be clear, Kyler’s math porn blog series errs not only on the topic of statistical independence (as discussed upthread). The project is riddled with motivated reasoning, cheery picked data, and superficial treatment of “evidence,” even going so far as to invent positive evidence out of clearly negative evidence, only to fit the narrative (Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon, e.g., his single strongest evidence score in favor of ancient true record).

The most glaring errors are the obvious non sequitur arguments presented to “interpret” certain data. For instance, Kyler argues that a long book >> true ancient record, which is an absurd conclusion (esp when considering the amount of plagiarized biblical material).

In another case of compounding bad scholarship, comprising one of his 2 highest evidence scores, the so-called “trajectory of evidence” is brought forward. This one was late in the project, so didn’t get much airtime. Kyler actually argues that apologists’ ability over time to “eliminate” some entries from a list of supposed Book of Mormon anachronisms (foxes guarding the henhouse, cough cough) qualifies as overwhelming evidence in favor of historicity. Like, we had 120 before and now we have just 40. And whaddyaknow, odds of 120 anachronisms is so much worse than only 40 anachronisms, so if you take the delta probability, it's like winning the PowerBall jackpot twice in a row. And then he actually counts that apologist-audited delta probability in favor of the Book of Mormon, despite the simple truth that one anachronism is devastating.

Who is Kyler’s audience? Someone who is smart/interested enough to care about these long statistical diatribes but not smart/interested enough to realize it’s riddled with errors? That’s gotta be an extremely small number of people.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

Post by DrStakhanovite »

MetaProf wrote:
Sun Sep 18, 2022 10:59 pm
Tangata is wrong about the meta-analysis stuff, and Kyler should have corrected it because he knows better.
Excellent catch!
Philo Sofee wrote:
Sun Sep 18, 2022 11:08 pm
Oh good! There for a second I thought you had found nothing wrong with Rasmussen's use of Bayes.
I think Rasmussen’s blog series was fascinating in terms of what it tells us about Rasmussen himself and the Interpreter Foundation more broadly, but in terms of substantial content that advances a scholarly conversation I think it failed as soon as it left the gate.

by the way Dr.Moore, if you ever feel the need to pay me to have my work checked out by competent third parties, let me go ahead and enthusiastically agree to that arrangement. Nothing like gettin’ bank for practicing good habits.
Physics Guy wrote:
Mon Sep 19, 2022 11:22 am
It's a common experience as a PhD student in theoretical physics to find a page of elegant, LaTeX-typeset derivations, simply lying around the office on a desk somewhere, that happens to be about exactly your own project and is giving wonderfully clear results. Five excited minutes later you realize that it's your own old notes from two months ago and completely wrong. The "TeX effect" just makes it look so authoritative that you nod your head in impressed agreement even when it's idiotic and you wrote it yourself.
Genuinely made me lol.
drumdude wrote:
Mon Sep 19, 2022 4:52 pm
Who is Kyler’s audience? Someone who is smart/interested enough to care about these long statistical diatribes but not smart/interested enough to realize it’s riddled with errors? That’s gotta be an extremely small number of people.
I’m coming around to the conclusion that mopologetics is aimed inward at a small community of believers as opposed aimed outward to a large and diverse readership.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

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Dr Moore wrote:
Mon Sep 19, 2022 3:11 pm
To be clear, Kyler’s math porn blog series errs not only on the topic of statistical independence (as discussed upthread). The project is riddled with motivated reasoning, cheery picked data, and superficial treatment of “evidence,” even going so far as to invent positive evidence out of clearly negative evidence, only to fit the narrative (Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon, e.g., his single strongest evidence score in favor of ancient true record).

The most glaring errors are the obvious non sequitur arguments presented to “interpret” certain data. For instance, Kyler argues that a long book >> true ancient record, which is an absurd conclusion (esp when considering the amount of plagiarized biblical material).

In another case of compounding bad scholarship, comprising one of his 2 highest evidence scores, the so-called “trajectory of evidence” is brought forward. This one was late in the project, so didn’t get much airtime. Kyler actually argues that apologists’ ability over time to “eliminate” some entries from a list of supposed Book of Mormon anachronisms (foxes guarding the henhouse, cough cough) qualifies as overwhelming evidence in favor of historicity. Like, we had 120 before and now we have just 40. And whaddyaknow, odds of 120 anachronisms is so much worse than only 40 anachronisms, so if you take the delta probability, it's like winning the PowerBall jackpot twice in a row. And then he actually counts that apologist-audited delta probability in favor of the Book of Mormon, despite the simple truth that one anachronism is devastating.
that "trajectory of evidence" of anachronisms was an utterly ridiculous piece of nonsense. That got one of his highest scores? Unbelievable.

I recall looking at KR's link to the anachronisms author's fairmormon presentation, where Matt Roper starts off by referring to a list of anachronisms he started with some 13 years ago. There are more than a few discrepancies with his original "anachronisms" list and the current list KR is relying upon.

Here are some anachronisms in Roper's original list that, surprise, surprise, don't make it to his final list:
submarine barges
Reformed Egyptian script
Book of Mormon place names
Book of Mormon personal names
https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/wp- ... 340313.png
:roll:

these "anachronisms," however, are counted as confirmed and no longer "anachronistic":
raw meat
3 Days journey
river in a valley
direction in wilderness
darkness felt
good grief.

and my all-time favorite "confirmed" as no longer an anachronism:
Archaeological Evidence.
How do these people give these presentations with a straight face?!!!
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

Post by Dr Moore »

This is why you see separation of work in data gathering and data analysis at pharmaceutical companies. No Foxes guarding the henhouse...

Go take 2 mins and read the post on "trajectory of evidence."
https://interpreterfoundation.org/estim ... idence-15/

From your post history, I think you'll get the gist right away. Again, this is one of his 2 highest evidence scores in favor of Book of Mormon historicity -- 20 orders of magnitude. What's 20 OOM among friends, eh?

Now, forget about the underlying apologetics - assume they're reasonable for a moment (by the way, that is not a good assumption -- you have an epic independence, data validity and data normalization problem there). But... even assuming good "data" about confirming anachronisms, how many credentialed practitioners of applied statistics would put their professional stamp of approval on Kyler's treatment and the conclusions of that treatment? I'd argue, it's zero, because zero is precisely the number of BYU profs or credible Mormon statisticians who have done so.

Kyler's education is in Psychology and includes a PhD in Experimental Psychology. So he'll have taken some stats. But it seems, just enough to be dangerous.

Kyler's volume of narrated believer porn with this project tells you there's no point even debunking his methods. I tried, by the way, to help. I offered to PAY Kyler if he could demonstrate a basis for independence in the point probabilities he multiplies in this project -- to be approved by a BYU stats professor. He declined. Then I offered to PAY for a trained BYU professor to audit his methods, a credible methodology peer review. Again, he rebuffed. I have the emails. His reasons were lame. He's just a dorky apologist who's super proud of his believer porn and doesn't want real working professionals to wreck the fun.
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Re: Answering Daniel C. Peterson’s call for assistance!

Post by IHAQ »

Dr Moore wrote:
Wed Sep 21, 2022 10:05 pm
This is why you see separation of work in data gathering and data analysis at pharmaceutical companies. No Foxes guarding the henhouse...

Go take 2 mins and read the post on "trajectory of evidence."
https://interpreterfoundation.org/estim ... idence-15/

From your post history, I think you'll get the gist right away. Again, this is one of his 2 highest evidence scores in favor of Book of Mormon historicity -- 20 orders of magnitude. What's 20 OOM among friends, eh?

Now, forget about the underlying apologetics - assume they're reasonable for a moment (by the way, that is not a good assumption -- you have an epic independence, data validity and data normalization problem there). But... even assuming good "data" about confirming anachronisms, how many credentialed practitioners of applied statistics would put their professional stamp of approval on Kyler's treatment and the conclusions of that treatment? I'd argue, it's zero, because zero is precisely the number of BYU profs or credible Mormon statisticians who have done so.

Kyler's education is in Psychology and includes a PhD in Experimental Psychology. So he'll have taken some stats. But it seems, just enough to be dangerous.

Kyler's volume of narrated believer porn with this project tells you there's no point even debunking his methods. I tried, by the way, to help. I offered to PAY Kyler if he could demonstrate a basis for independence in the point probabilities he multiplies in this project -- to be approved by a BYU stats professor. He declined. Then I offered to PAY for a trained BYU professor to audit his methods, a credible methodology peer review. Again, he rebuffed. I have the emails. His reasons were lame. He's just a dorky apologist who's super proud of his believer porn and doesn't want real working professionals to wreck the fun.
A recent analysis by Matt Roper concludes that, as of 2019, 70% of all the anachronisms identified in the book had been overturned by new archaeological and historical discoveries, with many more trending toward confirmation.
Building on that analysis, I ask just how unexpected that trajectory of confirmation is. Though we shouldn’t expect all of the book’s anachronisms to be overturned anytime in the near future, I estimate (using a reframing of current Book of Mormon evidence) that the probability of seeing that trajectory in a fraudulent text is p = 5.29 x 10-23. Even with a conservative estimate of the likelihood of seeing that trajectory in a true document, this evidence weighs heavily on the side of Book of Mormon authenticity.
Evidence Score = 20 (the evidence increases the probability of an authentic Book of Mormon by 20 orders of magnitude—a “critical strike” in the Book of Mormon’s favor)
"using a reframing of current Book of Mormon evidence"

The article, amongst other things, claims that the Horse anachronism has been successfully rebutted. Has it?
Tim Ernst on October 28, 2021 at 12:31 pm
I am aware that Billy hasn’t made a comment on this timeline yet, but referencing past comments, I thought I would add my two cents worth at this juncture.
Here’s the point which bothers me most about Billy Shears and his arguments: If Dr. Rasmussen’s analytical errors are so egregious, then why hasn’t Billy done the obvious and brought on his own secondary expert who can validate the claims he is making? Why is it always just Billy who screams the loudest and that he is the only statistician capable of correct Bayesian analysis?
I mean, if Billy Shears is so correct, then having a second, credentialed statistician verify his assessment would probably be a great start. I’m certain that Dr. Rasmussen has been extremely tolerant and attentive to Billy’s rants. I’m also fairly certain that if he were proved wrong, then Dr. Rasmussen would be the first to agree to toss the whole thing out as Billy suggests because as Billy claims, it’s all “junk” (Quoting Mr. Shears, “The fact is that if a highly educated and experienced practitioner such as myself looks at what the implicit assumptions are, basically every single one of them is obviously, patently false. The model is junk, beginning to end.” (Episode 14))
Given Kylers' steadfast refusal to have a credentialed statistician check his work (per the offer by Dr Moore) this comment is highly ironic.
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