Off Topic Comments from Book of Mormon Authorship Thread

[_Daniel Peterson]

No.

[_cinepro]

So, any chance the Maxwell Institute could put together and fund an additional study that incorporates the suggested improvements to the methodology and pool of potential authors?

Patience!

So...no chance to have the results by Friday?

[_Daniel Peterson]

So...no chance to have the results by Friday?

Since they presumably won't appear on a Saturday or a Sunday, there is a twenty percent chance that the results will be available on a Friday.

[_Jersey Girl]

I've sent a request to Shades that a split be done on this thread to free it of off topic exchanges. Mods, please take this post with the split.

[_marg]

I have split out posts from the Book of Mormon Authorship thread. They range in post dates between Jan 1- 7.

[_harmony]

I have no desire to distance myself from Dr. Lindsay's position.

I simply note that Dr. Lindsay and I are distinct individuals, and that, while Dr. Lindsay has made original comments on this topic, I have quite purposefully not done so.

Do you agree with Lindsay? Do you align with him, while allowing him to be the mouthpiece and keeping quiet yourself?

[_ludwigm]

Lindsay is an archetype.

See definition at An original model or type after which other similar things are patterned; a prototype: “‘Frankenstein’ . . . ‘Dracula’ . . . ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’ . . . the archetypes that have influenced all subsequent horror stories” (New York Times).

[_Jersey Girl]

I have split out posts from the Book of Mormon Authorship thread. They range in post dates between Jan 1- 7.

Talk about service! Thanks, marg.

[_Jersey Girl]

I hope my contribution doesn't interrupt the ongoing conversation, and if it does, I will be more than happy to start a new thread about this. By way of brief introduction, I have promoted and defended the findings of the Berkeley group for sometime on various other boards and groups, and I was very interested in finding out what the Jockers, et al study had to say about it (but, alas, not to the tune of $28).

Thank you, Dwight, for alerting me to this, and thank you, Dale, for the cut and paste job. My thoughts:

That’s not true at all. Rather than merely assuming that all the samples attributed to Nephi were written by the same author, and the book of Alma by one author, the Berkeley group performed within-author tests in order to verify that such was the case, and the results were contrary to what we would expect to see if each of these works was itself multi-authored.

I find this to be a rather odd complaint coming from the Stanford group when, according to Blair Hodges, they only used the 1830 edition of The Book of Mormon without bothering to utilize older sources at all. And beyond that, the fact that the BYU group’s use of more modern editions of the Book of Mormon yielded the same results as the Berkeley group’s use of the most primitive extant Book of Mormon manuscripts suggests that changes between the two are so minor that they didn’t sufficiently skew any wordprints anyway.

Ah, but the BYU study did, nevertheless, test for Rigdon, and the results came up negative.

Well that pretty much destroys the Stanford group’s credibility altogether. No one in the field of stylometry takes vocabulary-richness testing seriously any more when compared to non-contextual word-use, not even Holmes himself. How could Jockers, et al., have failed to recognize this fact, especially when they themselves relied upon function words in their delta testing? I mean, it doesn’t even appear that they’re aware of the testing performed by the FARMS group, which has been around since 1997 and which totally refutes everything that they’re saying here. And now I’m seriously wondering just how thoroughly they really researched all relevant data in the field of stylometry before they jumped into their study...

Manfred,

Would you care to discuss the Jockers study?

[_Jersey Girl]

Would you care to lend me $28?

Actually, I would love to read the study and would love to discuss it once I have, but, in the meantime, I thought I would post my thoughts on that portion of the study I have read. Have I picked the wrong thread in which to do this? If so, as I stated earlier, I would be more than happy to start a new thread to discuss Jockers, et al's treatment of the Berkeley study. But, in my defense, I didn't suppose it would be too unreasonable to reply to a post in the same thread in which it was posted, though it's easy enough for me to see it might be a bit tangential to this thread at large, and, as the thread's originator, I guess you would be the best one to make that call.

You don't need $28, Manfred. You can read this thread. The methods and outcomes are posted on this thread.