Everybody Wang Chung wrote:What is the likelihood the Interpreter deletes this entire article and the comments down the memory hole?
Bishop,
I take it it's been a while since you took Doctor Scratch's course in Mopologetic self-honesty?
There are, to date, no known cases of a Mopologist ever admitting they were wrong about anything, or ever apologizing for anything. Even over at SeN where the topic has crept up briefly, it's been maintained that no specific issues have really been brought up against the paper. And as you know, Wyatt says all the questions have been answered.
But damn guys, 10 ^135 ? Leave a little room for faith, would 'ya?
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
You seem to have a talent for this, and so would you mind unpacking this one? Put your apologist hat on for a few, and just take a stab at the numbers they might have used to get their 50; and explain what the numbers might mean.
Horses existed during Book of Mormon (Lehite and Jaredite) times
Coe’s standard: “It was then a broad, grass-covered plain, frequented by ‘big game’ — extinct species like horses, mastodons, camelids, the elephant-like gompothere” (p. 44). According to Dr. Coe, the horse was extinct in the Americas by Book of Mormon times.
[Page 156]Book of Mormon correspondence: Alma 18:9‒10, 12; Enos 1:21; and 3 Nephi 4:4, among others.
Analysis of correspondence: This is specific and detailed. The Book of Mormon clearly states that there were horses among the Book of Mormon peoples and that the horses existed in both Lehite and Jaredite times. Dr. Coe insists that they did not exist.
Likelihood = 50.0
Lou Midgley 08/20/2020: "...meat wad," and "cockroach" are pithy descriptions of human beings used by gemli? They were not fashioned by Professor Peterson.
LM 11/23/2018: one can explain away the soul of human beings...as...a Meat Unit, to use Professor Peterson's clever derogatory description of gemli's ideology.
Res Ipsa wrote:Maybe it is just wording, but this doesn't sound right to me. I'll reword and please tell me if it is what you intended.
S=Person has symptom D=Person has disease
Given D, the probability of S is 1. Given S, the likelihood that the person has the disease is .02
No, that's incorrect, this is about whether the symptom, or test, accurately predict the disease. so this: "Given D, the probability of S is 1."
does not capture that the symptom or test could be a false positive (which is similar to the same mistake the authors are making).
So if the test is positive, you can determine:
P(test is positive, given disease), [true positive] P(test is positive, given no disease), [false positive]
If the test is negative, you can determine:
P(test is negative, given disease), [false negative] P(test is negative , given no disease), [true negative]
Thanks, Lemmie. I wasn’t trying to calculate the correct odds of having the disease. I was trying to understand what Dean Robbers was saying. His use of “and” in the first line was ambiguous because it wasn’t phrased in the X given Y format.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
You seem to have a talent for this, and so would you mind unpacking this one? Put your apologist hat on for a few, and just take a stab at the numbers they might have used to get their 50; and explain what the numbers might mean.
Horses existed during Book of Mormon (Lehite and Jaredite) times
Coe’s standard: “It was then a broad, grass-covered plain, frequented by ‘big game’ — extinct species like horses, mastodons, camelids, the elephant-like gompothere” (p. 44). According to Dr. Coe, the horse was extinct in the Americas by Book of Mormon times.
[Page 156]Book of Mormon correspondence: Alma 18:9‒10, 12; Enos 1:21; and 3 Nephi 4:4, among others.
Analysis of correspondence: This is specific and detailed. The Book of Mormon clearly states that there were horses among the Book of Mormon peoples and that the horses existed in both Lehite and Jaredite times. Dr. Coe insists that they did not exist.
Likelihood = 50.0
Could one example be:
Likelihood Book of Mormon is “true” given Joseph Smith incorrectly put horses in Mesoamerica in Mayan Times: .02 Likelihood Book of Mormon is fiction given Joseph Smith incorrectly put horses in Mesoamerica in Mayan Times: .98
Ok, it’s 49, but you get the drift.
Do you think the authors actually did this calculation?
ETA: As spotted by Lemmie, I originally mislabeled the numbers. .98 should be the likelihood the Book of Mormon is fiction and .02 the likelihood the Book of Mormon is fact. To avoid confusion, I’ve corrected them in this post. I really shouldn’t try to math after 10:00.
Last edited by Guest on Fri May 10, 2019 5:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
Likelihood Book of Mormon is “true” given Joseph Smith incorrectly put horses in Mesoamerica in Mayan Times: .98 Likelihood Book of Mormon is fiction given Joseph Smith incorrectly put horses in Mesoamerica in Mayan Times: .02
Ok, it’s 49, but you get the drift.
Do you think the authors actually did this calculation?
I could well be wrong here...but...my (limited) understanding is that the Dales only used the data set in Coes book and so, if Coe didn't mention Mayan horses then the use of "horses" was excluded from their study and therefore not a negative to their (predetermined?) conclusion - that Coes assessment about the Book of Mormon's historicity (that it isn't historical, but is modern fiction), is wrong and the BT probabilities show that. But they didn't test their reasoning the other way round. They seem to have excluded any lack of correspondence between items that the Book of Mormon mentions but which have no place in Coes book The Maya.
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.” (Mathew Syed 'Black Box Thinking')
I note that Alan Wyatt is publicly taking credit for managing the peer review process of the Dales paper.
What is the Bayesian probability of there being 10 more ridiculous happenings than this before Dr Scratch publishes his Top Ten for 2019?
“When we are confronted with evidence that challenges our deeply held beliefs we are more likely to reframe the evidence than we are to alter our beliefs. We simply invent new reasons, new justifications, new explanations. Sometimes we ignore the evidence altogether.” (Mathew Syed 'Black Box Thinking')
Likelihood Book of Mormon is “true” given Joseph Smith incorrectly put horses in Mesoamerica in Mayan Times: .98 Likelihood Book of Mormon is fiction given Joseph Smith incorrectly put horses in Mesoamerica in Mayan Times: .02
Ok, it’s 49, but you get the drift.
Do you think the authors actually did this calculation?
I could well be wrong here...but...my (limited) understanding is that the Dales only used the data set in Coes book and so, if Coe didn't mention Mayan horses then the use of "horses" was excluded from their study and therefore not a negative to their (predetermined?) conclusion - that Coes assessment about the Book of Mormon's historicity (that it isn't historical, but is modern fiction), is wrong and the BT probabilities show that. But they didn't test their reasoning the other way round. They seem to have excluded any lack of correspondence between items that the Book of Mormon mentions but which have no place in Coes book The Maya.
The absence of horses is the first point of evidence against the Book of Mormon discussed in the paper. Apparently, they did include specific criticisms that Coe raised in his Dialogue paper as part of the analysis.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951
I don't know if Gadianton's question about how the Dales got their 50 was trying to get at something else, but I think Res Ipsa probably has the Dales' methodology, except perhaps for the issue of false positives and false negatives.
You can think of Bayesian inference as a learning algorithm whereby you update the probability that a hypothesis H is true, in light of each fresh piece of data D, by multiplying your previous probability by the factor P(D|H)/P(D). So the ratio between the probabilities of two hypotheses A and B gets updated, in consideration of the same new piece of data D, by the factor P(D|A) / P(D|B).
The lowest P(D|H) that the Dales are ever willing to assign to any data and any hypothesis is 2%. They say that explicitly even though it could only make sense in a world with a limited range of data and hypotheses—such as the world of medical imaging that Dale junior knows, perhaps. Anyway it means that the biggest 1/P(D|B) that the Dales allow is 50. So for the Dales the chance that the Book of Mormon would say there were horses if it were authentic is admitted to be low, but since the lowest chance that their methodology allows is 2%, they say that there's a 2% chance the Book of Mormon would describe horses in Mesoamerica even though it is an authentic ancient history of the area. Authenticity is their B hypothesis, the one that goes in the denominator of their likelihood ratio, so they take a 1/P(D|B) factor of 50 for the horse datum.
Do they have to also have a P(D|A) factor of 98% in the numerator for the horses datum? I don't think so, necessarily. P(D|A) and P(D|B) don't have to sum to one, because they're not probabilities of two exclusive cases, but conditional probabilities under two exclusive conditions. Presumably the Book of Mormon would be equally sure to describe the sky as blue, whether the Book was authentic or fake, so P(blue, given fake) and P(blue, given true) would both be close to 1 and sum to nearly 2. True and fake Books would likewise both be very unlikely to describe the sky as yellow, so P(yellow, given fake) and P(yellow, given true) would both be very small and sum to something much less than one.
Just because the Book of Mormon is fake doesn't mean it has to lie about everything. In the case of horses it seems to me that a fake Book of Mormon might still not necessarily have mentioned horses, so P(D|A) might be something like 80% or so for the D of mentioning horses. The Dales are apparently more generous to the fraud hypothesis, however, and assign P(D|A) of 100% in this case instead of 80% or even 98%, leaving a net factor P(D|A)/P(D|B) of 50 instead of 40 or 49 or whatever. That generosity in boosting P(horses|fraud) from 80% to 100% is nowhere near enough to make up for their generosity on the other side in boosting P(horses|true) from 10^-6 or something up to 0.02. The horses factor in favor of fraud should probably have been thousands of times larger than 50.
Last edited by Guest on Fri May 10, 2019 10:41 am, edited 8 times in total.
Res Ipsa wrote:Maybe it is just wording, but this doesn't sound right to me. I'll reword and please tell me if it is what you intended.
S=Person has symptom D=Person has disease
Given D, the probability of S is 1. Given S, the likelihood that the person has the disease is .02
No, that's incorrect, this is about whether the symptom, or test, accurately predict the disease. so this: "Given D, the probability of S is 1."
does not capture that the symptom or test could be a false positive...
RI wrote:Thanks, Lemmie. I wasn’t trying to calculate the correct odds of having the disease. I was trying to understand what Dean Robbers was saying. His use of “and” in the first line was ambiguous because it wasn’t phrased in the X given Y format.
You're welcome, but I wasn't trying to tell you how to calculate the correct odds, I was pointing out that your understanding of gad's line was incorrect.
Not to be a stickler about the language, but the "and" is not ambiguous, it means the two things occur together, so i was just noting that your language:
The paper has a problem re: the things that they assign a positive likelihood to. Their initial likelihood ratio defines the numerator as"
>>> P(fact B is guessed and shows up in Book of Mormon, given Book of Mormon fiction),
And the denominator as:
>>> P(fact B from Book of Mormon is presented as fact in Dr. Coe's book, given Book of Mormon true= contains facts, including B).
Without saying it, authors change their definition when they consider the several nonfacts. The problem with that is the denominator is now this:
>>> P(fact B not true, given Book of Mormon is non-fiction)
what is the probability that a statement is not true, given that it comes from a non-fiction book that by definition contains true statements? Pretty close to zero, right? Therefore, a numerator (that can't be larger than 1) divided by a number approaching zero results in a likelihood ratio that approaches infinity.
As Physics guy pointed out, the horse example should have a likelihood ratio much larger than the limits of 2, 10 or 50 allowed by the authors.
