The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Gadianton]

Either way, though, it would have nothing to do with the inspiration of Joseph Smith in particular. If you want to show that he was more inspired than his New England neighbors, you have to show that his guesses about Mayans were better than theirs would have been.

Maybe it ultimately reduces to numerous tight guesses about Mayan specific guesses. But, hmmm. What I was thinking, is the example Analytics gave of "excellent workmanship". Perhaps nobody else thought to include in their pseudo history anything about Mayan excellent workmanship. But 19th century trade and auction mags talk about it all the time. Perhaps nobody thought to include a volcano or earthquake, but perhaps in other fiction, an earthquake or volcano is a popular theme.

[_Analytics]

3- How can you possibly conclude that a true book mentioning "excellent workmanship" (point 6.18) is 50 times more likely than a false book mentioning it? This is totally made up.

Just looking at my spreadsheet here, and I think we've gone over this point before with Bayes and apologetics. Accounting for the likelihood of seeing the evidence if H is false is possibly the main thing religious belief does wrong as it goes about finding justifications for belief. If I Google "excellent workmanship" 1830 archive.org, the hits pour in. In fact, you can discount anything the Book of Mormon says that would have been natural to write about in 1830. The control texts are ridiculous. They are writing as if, here are a known collection of facts about the ancient Myans, now here is a text by Spaulding that tries to guess what would have been true for the Myans. And now here is a book by Smith that tries to guess at what would have been true for the Myans. We see that Smith did far better than Spaulding and so our method of finding hits fails for the control texts. But that's the wrong control: the right control is the sum of all 1830 influences that would have caused smith or spaulding to create a hit if the Book of Mormon is false (or MS is false).

And so it's not exactly what was pointed out above about all ancient societies having something in common, it's about what we would have expected a 19th century writer to say about the ancient world. The only evidence that would be interesting at all in the least, would be something the Book of Mormon says that would be considered extremely odd for somebody to have said in 1830. I'm open to examples but can't think of any....

But that is exactly what they tried to do. A basic pattern of their reasoning is like, "The Book of Mormon mentions thrones, and there were thrones in Mesoamerica. But it would be extremely odd for Joseph Smith to mention thrones in a made up book because as far as Joseph Smith knew, the North-American Indians didn't have thrones. Major hit for the Book of Mormon!!!"

Their insistence of this being "extremely odd" is based on their idea of what Joseph Smith would think about the history of Indians. What they seem to have forgotten is that Joseph Smith wasn't just making up a book about the ancestors of the Native Americans. He was also making up a book about the descendants of the Israelites in the Bible.

This goes back to the issue of independence. All of the alleged hits that are characteristics that are shared between the world of the Bible and the world of Mesoamerica aren't independent at all, because they can all be explained by the single assumption that Joseph Smith made up the story that the white and delightsome chosen people from the Middle East brought with them mid-eastern trappings.

[_Philo Sofee]

The Dale's, the authors of the article have it made in the shade, and they knew they would coming into it all. All they have to say to anyone refuting their use of Bayes, or evidences, or facts, is, "You haven't read our article carefully, you do not understand." This is classic apologetic. I also remain entirely unconvinced. They haven't yet answered any objections whatsoever, they have simply claimed anyone who disagrees with them has not read the article and does not refute their use of Bayes. How convenient......

I would be thrown out immediately were I to ever comment, but someone sorely needs to bring up the Bayesian refutation of a real, historical Jesus, and how that is problematic for their supposed real "historic" Book of Mormon. If Bayes is valid for Jesus being fake, then it is for the Book of Mormon being fake. If Bayes is wrong about Jesus being myth, how is it right for Book of Mormon being historical?! Oh what a conundrum!

[_Simon Southerton]

The Dale's, the authors of the article have it made in the shade, and they knew they would coming into it all. All they have to say to anyone refuting their use of Bayes, or evidences, or facts, is, "You haven't read our article carefully, you do not understand." This is classic apologetic. I also remain entirely unconvinced. They haven't yet answered any objections whatsoever, they have simply claimed anyone who disagrees with them has not read the article and does not refute their use of Bayes. How convenient......

This is the apologetic equivalent of gish galloping. Blind your opponent with so many arguments regardless of how weak or accurate they are. Sorenson has done this for the last five decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

It also looks like Romney as used the same tactic! This is begging to be made into a meme.

[_Gadianton]

This goes back to the issue of independence. All of the alleged hits that are characteristics that are shared between the world of the Bible and the world of Mesoamerica aren't independent at all, because they can all be explained by the single assumption that Joseph Smith made up the story that the white and delightsome chosen people from the Middle East brought with them mid-eastern trappings.

I guess my gut is telling me we need to go beyond even this. I like the way you put it: They're thinking "..because as far as Joseph Smith knew, the North-American Indians didn't have thrones". While I agree that the KJV is the elephant in the room for source material, I feel like we're still stuck in a mode of imagining that Joseph Smith is trying his darndest to make up real Indian history with Biblical connections. Who knows precisely what he was trying to make up? Am I wrong to think that, whatever motives and ambitions, if something in the Book of Mormon exists significantly in the 19th century in a way that he'd very possibly know about it, then the probability that such a thing could make it into the Book of Mormon if it's false is pretty darn high?

Let me give an example. Perhaps it's not the best, but I'm not a Book of Mormon buff, and this is one I did dig into a little (surprised i found it):

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=38828

Book of Mormon agriculture. The arch-summary is that there are logical problems with agriculture in the Book of Mormon; no agriculture cults (i followed Coe here I believe), no combinations to give a complete protein, and no mentions of root crops. Also, I found distinct evidence that root crops were lacking in New England farming. It's surely no stretch to believe that Joseph Smith drew upon his background as a farmer rather than follow the Bible or even go out of his way to copy other psuedo-biblical texts or reciting other myth culture in a focused attempt at creating the most believable indian tale that could be told. I point out in this thread, that Bushman uses the Book of Mormon's lack of corn, beans, and rice (beans + rice; complete protein lol) as evidence against Joseph Smith borrowing from View of the Hebrews. Maybe I'm missing something, but as a critic, while certainly it helps to have explanations for the concoctions of Smith, it's less necessary than knowing the information was readily available to his time and place.

[_kairos]

Some great analysis going on here - keep it up!

For me it seems that if Coe had written that Mayans rode
Horses and used elephants in their society then common hits with
the Book of Mormon would be noteworthy but since he did NOT and Joseph Smith DID, these two instances alone blows the Book of Mormon out of historical waters!
And I did not use any math!
Just calculatin,
k

[_Dr Exiled]

I have to clarify: I have not actually read this article. I have only been raising general issues that could be problems with an article like this, in the hope that someone else would do the grunt work of reading the paper and seeing what problems are actually there.

If these guys have been talking about likelihood ratios, then my second potential problem of normalization is not relevant. The normalization factor will be the same for both P(A) and P(B), so it will cancel out in the likelihood ratio. So if the paper is all about ratios, then my second potential problem is really completely irrelevant. It should not be considered as another weight on the scale against this paper. It should instead be completely discounted.

There may remain a serious issue related to it, if the probability that a genuine historical record should screw up a basic fact of Mayan society was artificially limited in this paper to no lower than 2%. If these guys have done that kind of thing, then that is a real problem. As my discussion of normalization mentioned, the probability of basic screw-ups like that should be way lower than 2%. Even the 0.1% that I assumed arbitrarily for the sake of example was generous. I mean, how likely is it that a contemporary American historian should describe the presidency as a hereditary office? How likely is it that an American state would make its governorship hereditary and have the anomaly persist for several generations? That's the sort of scenario we'd be considering, I think, if were to suppose that some of the discrepancies between Mayan society and the Book of Mormon were nonetheless compatible with historical authenticity. Assigning a probability of 2% to such errors is way too lenient.

So please read it and let us know what you think. It should be easy to spot the errors for you. How does one divine historical probabilities anyway? Guess? This seems to be a glaring error in using bayes theorem for anything other than areas where the probabilities can be found with some certainty.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Ok, I’ve now read the whole paper, and I have a very basic question: does it actually use Bayesian analysis at all?

Short answer is that “yes they are” but how they went about it is convoluted and isn’t playing well. Usually one starts out with your most abstracted expression (using variables) and after explaining the process of how the sausage is made, you go your specifics and actually make the sausage. You try to be as transparent as possible with your entire process and hope that the strength of your methods is enough to impress people to accept the sausage once it is presented.

For whatever reasons the authors and editors decided that they would just present people the sausage (give the values, explain their relations, then execute the computations) and extoll the virtue of sausages in general by saying that anyone can make their own sausage if they don’t like the author’s.

They act as if all there is to Bayes is the use of prior probability. They don’t do the heavy lifting of working through the equation to rigorously determine the actual strength of each piece of evidence.

I think they overemphasized the priors as a way to showcase a“look how generous we are being to the skeptics!” attitude, though in fact their epistemic generosity was pretty paltry. Fits the pseudo-piety of Mopologetics like a glove really, probably why Midgley tap danced into the comments so quickly.

[_Res Ipsa]

Thanks, that makes sense.

[_MrStakhanovite]

Regarding Mr Stak's point about re-stating how to map the information without limiting it to being a fact; even with that fix, another large problem arises.

Let me try again…

The axioms of subjective probability have the comparable probability relation > being defined as a set of boolean algebra א (Not the usual symbol but I was getting an SQL ERROR with doublestrokes so I just went with alef ) with all A events and B events being subsets. The empty event is ∅ and the universal event is Ω. So for every A event in א would mean ∅ ⊆ A ⊆ Ω. On any probability measures on א, only P(Ω) is going to equal 1 and nothing else.

I totally get that they wrote this in such a fashion that it commits them to some stupid stuff, but I think they are going to be more committed to the aforementioned axioms than their own stylistic word choices.