Interpreter tries to fix one of their sharpshooter fallacies

[Marcus]

No, pg said Carmack's "entire body of work." That's at least 15. Plus 1=16. That qualifies as "many," and significantly more than 5.

Surely we could find a piece of Carmack work that doesn’t qualify, right?

You, before trying to move the goalposts with the above:

Please name and link five published (of the “many”) articles from Interpreter that use this fallacy...

[honorentheos]

Make it the three from the current issue about Book of Mormon names, Hamites in the Book of Abraham, and NHM, then? I'm not trying to cherry pick here. I haven't opened two of them and only skimmed the NHM article. Call it an experiment. Can an article in the Interpreter avoid the TSSF while attempting to place the Book of Mormon or Book of Abraham into an ancient context?

Alright. Let’s go with these three. Have you read them? I haven’t read them yet but I shall begin now.

Looks like Rappleye's article on Nahom is the only one of the three available at the moment. So lets make use of the delay by working out the methodology we can agree on. In fact, it seems we don't even have an objective that is clearly defined. Your reply to drumdude's OP asked:

Please name and link five published (of the “many”) articles from Interpreter that use this fallacy.

Based on this the objective is to establish the TSSF is used in the article.

The TSSF's form:

X and Y are compared by several criteria.
A conclusion is made based on only the criteria that produce the desired outcome.

So we are looking for the author to draw conclusions favoring their prior preferred condition though comparison of hits while avoiding or de-emphasizing misses.

Fair? Care to make modifications?

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

Also, Flemming, please drop the Appeal to Authority and Proof by Intimidation*.

- Doc

* Making an argument purposely difficult to understand in an attempt to intimidate your audience into accepting it, a la asking an audience to read a 25-page paper about Blocking in Georgian Verb Morphology in order to establish Carmack’s credibility with regard to not using TSSF when concocting a mopologetic, is just deflection. People on this board are well acquainted with this particular method of deflection and it’s tiresome.

[drumdude]

Also, Flemming, please drop the Appeal to Authority and Proof by Intimidation*.

- Doc

* Making an argument purposely difficult to understand in an attempt to intimidate your audience into accepting it, a la asking an audience to read a 25-page paper about Blocking in Georgian Verb Morphology in order to establish Carmack’s credibility with regard to not using TSSF when concocting a mopologetic, is just deflection. People on this board are well acquainted with this particular method of deflection and it’s tiresome.

Interpreter has posted so much junk that it no longer has any credibility. It’s assumed bogus until proven otherwise.

[honorentheos]

I didn't know this before but the abstract for the Nahom piece now makes me smile.

Abstract: For decades, several Latter-day Saint scholars have maintained that there is a convergence between the location of Nahom in the Book of Mormon and the Nihm region of Yemen. To establish whether there really is such a convergence, I set out to reexamine where the narrative details of 1 Nephi 16:33–17:1 best fit within the Arabian Peninsula, independent of where the Nihm region or tribe is located. I then review the historical geography of the Nihm tribe, identifying its earliest known borders and academic interpretations of their location in antiquity.

Rappleye understands marketing. How so? The first sentence is a wonder of it, taking a concept he and Smoot formalized in 2014 regarding the so called Nahom Convergence and absorbing into this framework the various apologetic attempts to associate the Book of Mormon place name "Nahom" with anything geographic or cultural on the Arabian Peninsula with the N-H-M abjad.

[Marcus]

Rappleye explains it:

...These interpretations will then be considered against the data on ancient Arabia as reported by mainstream, non-Latter-day Saint scholars who are naturally uninfluenced by the details of the Book of Mormon narrative...

Because of course, the lds scholars ARE naturally influenced by the details of the b of m narrative...

a.k.a., the Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

[Marcus]

Rappleye's article is so bad I can't look away.

After Ishmael’s burial at Nahom, Lehi’s party turned “nearly eastward from that time forth” (1 Nephi 17:1). Using the known points where ancient trade routes turned to a generally east-west directional bearing provides a limited number of places where Lehi and his family could have turned “nearly eastward” for the final leg of their journey. This, in turn, puts constraints on where Nahom must be located, independent of any historical or inscriptional evidence for where a tribe or toponym with an NHM name might be found. As the Hiltons reasoned in 1976, “the locale of Nahom would be in the area where the frankincense trail is known to have turned eastward. Thus, we determined that a study of the communities in this area might uncover a possible Nahom.”74

a.k.a., 'thus, we determined that of all the references to NHM all over, one of them near this arrow we circled will be the true one. Because that's where it has to be. Therefore that's where it will be. (Or at least one that is somewhat likely to be slightly like what we need, and at least one Mormon interprets it this way, even if no other Yemen historian would ever agree, or even be able to avoid laughing us Mormons out of academia.)'

a.k.a., another Texas sharpshooter fallacy, if somewhat forced.

[honorentheos]

The premise of the article is defined here:

When discussing the relationship between archaeological discoveries and written sources, archaeologist William G. Dever explained that “convergences” are “points at which the two lines of evidence, when pursued independently and as objectively as possible, appear to point in the same direction and can be projected eventually to meet.”23 Therefore, if there really is a convergent relationship between Nahom and Nihm, it will be confirmed by independent examinations of both (1) where Nahom should be located, based on where the narrative details of 1 Nephi 16:33–17:1 best fit within Arabia; and (2) the historical geography of the Nihm tribe, seeking to understand its earliest known location and ancient boundaries, as best as can be determined from historical, archaeological, and scholarly sources.

This is the can of paint and brush. It also really takes a special kind of person to boldly proclaim they are independently examining two issues (in this case the route of the Lehi party as described in 1 Nephi, and the geographical range of the Nihm tribe) in an article that constantly reminds the reader they are engaging in an examination of where the two might overlap. Nevermind the assumptions about the name Nahom baked into THAT premise disqualifying one of the two issues from a claim of independent verification...

It's pretty bad on the whole. But if one reads the article, pay attention to how Rappleye attempts to bend Dever's quote regarding the convergence of actual independent lines of evidence into another "what are the odds?" conclusion.

As coda: in the current age of machine learning I WOULD be interested in seeing an attempt to use GIS to map the potential locations for the Lehi party's journey in the old world using only the description from the Book of Mormon. How would a trained A.I. interpret the limited information to establish more or less likely routes for the journey?