John Gee's FAIR Presentation

[_Fence Sitter]

Paul,

Where did you find a copy of Facsimile#4? What an incredible find!!!

[_malkie]

Yes, this is part of a pattern of behavior. It is not just one fishy photo or one reliance on a statistical outlier to make one's case; it is the repeated use of such sleights of hand in order to manipulate the impressions of his readers to reach a certain predetermined conclusion. What makes it worse is that it is all so unnecessary.

Joseph Smith, Hugh Nibley, and John Gee are liars for the Lord.



Paul O

Is his wife petting a baby horse?

[_Shulem]

Is his wife petting a baby horse?

1. Verily, thus saith the Lord, it is Rudolph the rednosed reindeer bearing gifts for all the Mormon children gathered together to receive Christmas treats from the hand of the Queen of Egypt.

2. The Spirit bears record and the record is true.

3. In the name of John Gee, Amen.

[_Doctor Scratch]

Well, this is my cue to exit the thread. Dr. Gee strikes me as a good man who doesn't deserve this sort of abuse.

Andrew or Chris, if you have any other questions or comments feel free to pm me.

Regards

Oh really Green?

Then what, pray tell, does one need to do to deserve this level of criticism, which you choose to classify as "abuse"?

He has lied repeatedly to numerous people about this issue for more than a decade now. So at what point does a liar need to be called out for lying? In my view, the fact that he is supposed to be a scholar means he should be held to much higher standards. He clearly has no problems throwing out the "deception" card when it comes to his broad brushed criticism of "apostates." And this he does with not even a fraction of the evidence for lying that exists against him. He constantly accuses us of deception with no evidence. Even in his latest FAIR presentation he reiterates this rhetoric. Critics cannot be trusted because we're helpers of Satan, pretty much. John Gee is the last person who needs to be preaching about trustworthiness.

The thing is, J Green will defend this sort of thing if it's being done in the FARMS Review to somebody like Rodney Meldrum. J Green will sit there, going paragraph by paragraph, explaining why he thinks Greg Smith's "hit piece" is important, informative, and well-written, never once seeing anything wrong with the fact that, not only is Meldrum being accused of some pretty darn ugly things (some of the same things, more or less, that Gee is being accused of, actually), but this is also happening with the attached imprimature of the MI, BYU, and the Church. And yet: when a few people get a bit rowdy in the informal atmosphere of a messageboard, it's too much for him and he bails. Gee is "a good man who doesn't deserve this."

[Guest]

The friendly folks at FAIR have now posted Gee's talk.

Andy Cook developed a slightly different formula...

He did? Somehow they look the same.

...and he and Chris Smith applied it to one of the papyri and they’ve been loudly proclaiming that they who have never worked with papyri...

Fortunately, Cook won't be "loudly proclaiming" any more of his papyrological atrocities at MDDB, since he is now banned.

...know more than I who have been working with papyri for a quarter of a century.

Not to mention the fact that, "a quarter of a century" ago, Chris was in diapers!

Now, I realized that none of these formulas had ever actually been tested with a real papyrus to see if they work. So I measured a scroll in Toronto that I had seen in the back rolls of the museum before it was unrolled and I applied these various formulas to the measurement to see how they fared and this was published this year in an article called “Formulas and Faith”.

Coincidentally, Cook has done the very same thing; he's even given it a similar title.

Now, this graph is the result of my little study. You can see Hoffmann’s formula is somewhat erratic.

Similarly, C=pi*D can be "somewhat erratic" in computing a circle's circumference from its measured diameter.

It matches the actual length of the scroll much better than Andy Cook’s formula, which is the one there on the bottom.

Yes, the bottom is where "Andy Cook's formula" belongs. Anyone who's "never worked with papyri" must start right at the entry level.

Cook made some errors in his calculations and to show you the errors in the calculation I want to show you the same chart at a slightly different scale and I’m going to take Hoffmann’s formula out.

Good idea to get Hoffmann's formula out of there. In the words of Daniel Peterson, this will make Cook's and Smith's mistakes "very clear".

So, the one on top is the actual length of the scroll. The one on the bottom is where Cook’s formula predicts what it will be.

Although the "one on the bottom" appears nowhere near what "Cook's formula predicts", this is nevertheless "a helpful overview".

Now, when Cook’s article came out I read it...

That is very good to know, since this little factoid may not otherwise be apparent.

...and identified five different errors that Cook made in his formula...

Five? Whoah, that's a lot of errors.

...and if you fix just one of those mistakes you get this chart which you can see that you can come up with something that tracks much more closely to the actual length of the papyrus.

What a miraculous fix! It's a good thing this didn't go unnoticed.

The errors are therefore something in Cook’s formula and methodology and not something in the papyrus measurements.

So if you "fix" something and "something" gets better then Cook's methodology is flawed? Got it. Obviously, the papyrus measurements should never be questioned.

It shows us that Cook’s methodology is fundamentally flawed.

Good to hear this again, in case we missed it earlier.

Now, I attribute Cook’s mistakes to working in a new field, where neither he nor Chris Smith have had any experience working with papyrus before.

This brings us back to the diaper issue.

And there were some math mistakes that for some reason Cook did not catch.

Well you know Cook, he's been hanging around that Smith too long.

As you can see, if he corrected one mistake it would have made a big difference in his results.

Gosh dang, just one mistake? This sounds like King David all over again.

There are still other mistakes in the formula that correspond to physical features of the papyri.

Hmmm, so the papyri are causing mistakes in the formula? Well, I wouldn't put it past them. Papyri are tricky devils. I think it would take at least a quarter of a century to figure out all their shenanigans.

One of them are these spikes right here. One of them are these dips right there.

Yup, those spikes and dips are "very clear".

And the third is this little mismatch in the corner.

That may be the most devious one of all.

And the fifth one actually deals with the Joseph Smith Papyrus and not the general formula.

It's good to see all five of those little devils captured and properly categorized.

So, unfortunately for Cook and Smith, if you fix the math on their formula, then according to their formula, the length of Horus’s scrolls needs to be about four times what they calculated.

A factor of four? Hmmm, maybe we'll be hearing more about this...

I come up with about 314 centimeters, which is about ten feet three and a half inches give or take a foot.

Well that gets us most of the way, but Cook and Smith said it would take ~511 cm, so we need a little more.

Because wait! There’s more.

Yes! I knew there was more!

One of the things I’ve learned with this experience is that I’ve identified a number of fallacious assumptions made by both formulas that undermine my confidence in any of them.

This gets back to the issue of the papyri tampering with the formulas.

The last three errors that I identified are irreparable.

Dang, no repairs? Not even with a quarter century of experience?

The best the formulas can therefore do is give a ballpark estimate and a ballpark estimate is a useful thing to know.

Okay, so 314 cm is in the "ballpark" of 511 cm and that is indeed "useful". Is there anything else we need to know? What about Cook/Smith's "five different errors"? Do we need to know what they actually were or should we just be satisfied that there were five of them? Could there be more than five? If someone asks about this, should we say "Cook and Smith made five mistakes" or should we say "Cook and Smith made at least five mistakes"? Also, do these five mistakes occur in any particular order or do they just show up randomly all over the paper?

[_Bob Loblaw]

Gee seems determined to prove himself to be a dishonest asshole. He's doing a damn good job.

[_Molok]

I guess the papyri murdered the fourth mistake in its sleep, and dumped it in the hudson river or something.

[_Cicero]

As you can see, if he corrected one mistake it would have made a big difference in his results.

Seriously? Wow, I never knew that changing one number in a complex mathematical formula can dramatically change the results. Thanks for enlightening me John.

Sheesh, please spend more time explaining why it was an ERROR rather than making such a banal statement (and just pointing out relative age differences doesn't count).

[_Fence Sitter]

Andrew,

Do I understand Gee correctly. Is he now asserting the Horus scroll is only 10'± long and has backed away from his 40' claim?


Gee said

he length of Horus’s scrolls needs to be about four times what they calculated. I come up with about 314 centimeters, which is about ten feet three and a half inches give or take a foot. Because wait! There’s more.

[_Kishkumen]

So, are these presentations supposed to be informative in some way, or is this just a ritual denunciation of the critics as "wrong"?

So far Book of Abraham presentations at FAIR look long on mysteries and declarations, but short on argumentation and evidence.