The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Analytics]

His latest post is a nice, narrative caution outlining why the Dales may want to reconsider having this publication attributable to them and easily discovered on the web. I won't quote it, but it's worth a visit to the comments to read.

Anyway, I still have yet to find a hit counted by the Dales that withstood close examination of both texts to see what details showed a correspondence. I don't think Bruce Dale's hope to shift the discussion to the correspondences is going to work out well, either.

All of the discussions here about the statistical independence among the hits seem to miss a more fundamental problem--the hits aren't really hits. If a hit isn't a hit, the question of whether these non-hit hits are independent doesn't even make sense.

[_Physics Guy]

131 misses will still all be misses whether or not they're independent, yes. But independence is still pretty important.

If there are 131 independent issues here then you have to debunk dozens of the claimed hits before the final odds tip significantly in favor of fraud. If on the other hand there are really only a few independent choices made by Smith in constructing his imaginary culture of Jewish expatriates, then just unravelling a couple of hits is enough to topple the whole apologetic argument.

Given the long bout of mudwrestling that would be needed to debunk dozens of apologist hits, I think it's better to debunk independence first.

After all, there's still plenty of mud left in those artifact-devouring Mesoamerican swamps. If 60-odd Dale hits get debunked, I expect the Dales or their fans can just go and dig up another few dozen hits to restore the balance. Assumed independence of every little issue is an apologetic gift that will never stop giving—if they're allowed to keep it.

[_Lemmie]

131 misses will still all be misses whether or not they're independent, yes. But independence is still pretty important....
Given the long bout of mudwrestling that would be needed to debunk dozens of apologist hits, I think it's better to debunk independence first.

agreed, but they already did quite a bit of the debunking themselves with their grouped categories, as noted previously, so there is really not much left of the independence argument:

Going further, note the way the 131 "independent" statements from the Maya are defined:

Specifically, we have found 131 such correspondences. We divide these correspondences into six separate categories:
• Political (33 correspondences)
• Cultural/social (31 correspondences)
• Religion (19 correspondences)
• Military/warfare (12 correspondences)
• Physical/geographical (13 correspondences)
• Technological/miscellaneous (23 correspondences)

In each category, the authors are asserting that every single correspondence is considered as occurring independently of every other correspondence both within and between groups, but they group them by commonalities that by default suggest dependencies!

In order for two events to be independent, the existence of one event has to have no influence on the existence of the other, so to show how dependent statements within a common group can be, consider two examples of relatedness: if someone was writing a story where they describe "warfare with ambushes and traps [group 4, # 7]," what are the odds that they might also describe "raids to take captives/slaves [group 4, # 8]" ? What would be the likelihood that telling a story where "fighting with 'darts' [group 4, # 5] " might also include a description of "thick clothing used as armor [group 4, # 4]" ??

viewtopic.php?p=1181362#p1181362

Their assertion of the total independence of every single statement from every other single statement, especially since they are picking all of the statements out of one book, by a single author, is not a rational position.

[_Lemmie]

His latest post is a nice, narrative caution outlining why the Dales may want to reconsider having this publication attributable to them and easily discovered on the web. I won't quote it, but it's worth a visit to the comments to read.

Anyway, I still have yet to find a hit counted by the Dales that withstood close examination of both texts to see what details showed a correspondence. I don't think Bruce Dale's hope to shift the discussion to the correspondences is going to work out well, either.

All of the discussions here about the statistical independence among the hits seem to miss a more fundamental problem--the hits aren't really hits. If a hit isn't a hit, the question of whether these non-hit hits are independent doesn't even make sense.

When i was looking at the comment about gold and silver, i noticed at least 9 comments where the correspondence relied upon a Mayan lowland behavior.

Comments about lowlands that were used to support the Dales hits included "hived off from the southern Lowlands," "people in the lowlands," " in the case of the lowland Maya," “The lowland Maya almost always...," " cities in the Maya lowlands," "this remote part of the Maya lowlands," etc, etc.

However, in the comment supporting a LR = 0.5 regarding refined gold, the story suddenly changed:


"Coe resists the idea that the lowland Maya had much refined gold before about AD 800, well after the Book of Mormon times.

But the Book of Mormon does not claim to be set among the lowland Maya, so this is irrelevant."


What. the. HELL?????

So that's 10 correspondences that the Dales used to support a historical Book of Mormon, that are just nonsense, because they rely on the Dales taking the exact opposite position as their final one. Again, a peer reviewer doesn't have to be a Book of Mormon expert to catch such intellectual dishonesty.

a more fundamental problem--the hits aren't really hits.

Couldn't agree more.

[_Lemmie]

Billy Sheer continues to land devastating blows to the paper. When Bruce Dale brought up the presence of a calendar as a commonality between the Book of Mormon and The Maya, he readily pointed out the Dales' ongoing issues with confusing broad shared subjects with no details shared as actual misses being my misconstrued as strong hits.

The null hypothesis of the Book of Mormon is that it is a made-up account of a group of proto-Christian Jews who immigrated from Jerusalem to the New World in 600 B.C. These people brought their Jewish/Christian heritage with them, built a great civilization (as evidenced by the then well-known Moundbuilders who had once inhabited North America), and after 1,000 years they fell from grace and devolved into the “savages” that were discovered 1,000 years after that. Anything that is consistent with how Joseph Smith could have reasonably conceived of an epic story of a group of people who went from being pilgrims from Jerusalem to civilized Moundbuilders to savages over the course of thousands of years is completely consistent with this theory.

The Jewish calendar is based lunar months, solar years, and pays particular attention paid to the seasons (that is why Easter is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox), and most importantly, seven-day weeks. This calendar eventually evolved into the Gregorian calendar which Joseph Smith used and is still used today.

Everything regarding dates and calendars in the Book of Mormon is consistent with this. They had seven-day weeks and kept the sabbath holy (e.g. Jarom 1:5, Mosiah 18:25, Alma 32:11). They had lunar months (Omni 1:21). Solar years were carefully counted, sometimes in unlikely ways (e.g. 3 Nephi 5:7). According to this counting, one can easily verify that Lehi left Jerusalem in 600 B.C., right before the fall of Jerusalem, that Jesus was then born on cue in 1 BC, and then died, was resurrected, and visited them 33 years later, right on cue. This all seems like it was written by somebody creating historical fiction that needed to calibrate with some events that were predefined and presumed to be historic. The counting is done exactly as somebody using a Gregorian calendar would do it.

In contrast, here are some quotes from Cole: “The Calendar Round of 52 years was present among all Mesomaericans, including the Maya, and is presumably of very great age. It consists of two permutating cycles. One is of 260 days, representing the intermeshing of a sequence of the numbers 1 through 13 with 20 named days…the 260-day count was fundamental…Meshing with the 260-day count is a “vague year” or Ha’b of 365 days…from this it follows that a particular day in the 260-day count, such as 1 K’an, also had a position in the Ha’b, for instance 2 Pop. A day designated as 1 Ka’n 2 Pop could not return until 52 Ha’b (18,980 days) had passed. This is the Calendar Round, and it is the only annual time count possessed by the highland peoples of Mexico….”

But for keeping track of history, the Mayans didn’t count Calendar Rounds, much less “vague years.” Rather, they used Long Counts. Quoting Coe:

“Instead of taking the Vague Year as the basis for the Long Count, the Maya and other peoples employed the turn, a period of 360 days. The Long Cycles are:

20 k’ins = 1 winal or 20 days
18 winals = 1 turn or 360 days
20 turns = 1 k’atun or 7,200 days
20 k’atuns = 1 bak’tun or 144,000 days

“Long Count dates inscribed by the Maya on their monuments consist of the above cycles listed from top to bottom in descending order of magnitude, each with its numerical coefficient, and all to be added up so as to express the number of days elapsed since the end of the last but one Great Cycle, a period of 13 bak’tuns the ending of which fell on the date 4 Ajaw 8 Kumk’u….”

Analysis: The Book of Mormon keeps track of history in months and years in a way that is indistinguishable from the Gregorian calendar, and is carefully calibrated so that Lehi leaving Jerusalem, the birth of Christ, and the death of Christ can all be reconciled with old-world history. In contrast, the Mayans kept track of historical days using Long Count days, which is really about counting up days since the end of the last “great cycle,” but rather than being “base 10” as we would count, they are counted using k’ins, winals, tuns, k’atuns, and bak’tuns. There is nothing in this that could be construed as months and years, nor could it easily be converted into lunar months and solar years.

Central to Mayan life were 260 day cycles. Central to Book of Mormon life were 7-day weeks.

The calendar in the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with the Mayan Calendar. This is very strong evidence that it is not based on Mesoamerican history. I score this a “likelihood ratio” of 50+.

Wow. That is a very detailed and well-supported analysis.

Contrast that with the Dales' analysis:

Both the Book of Mormon peoples and the peoples described in The Maya kept calendars by day, month and year. The keeping of calendars is also unusual. The Indian peoples of eastern North America did not keep calendars, and were focused on the passing of the seasons. How did Joseph Smith “guess” that any Indians kept an absolute calendar by day, month and year? Likelihood = 0.02.

That is such a complete and total miss by the Dales.

[_Lemmie]

Great comment from B Shears a couple of days ago, on statistical bias:

Billy Shears
on May 20, 2019 at 9:35 am said:

Hi Bruce,

You said, “As we examine the evidence, I think it will clarify why Billy Shears is wrong. Our methodology is not biased toward selecting for agreement, as Billy claims.”

Just to be clear, I am using the word “bias” in the technical sense. You could objectively compare the points of similarity between the Book of Mormon and the Maya and still have a very strong statistical bias. You are making a very strong claim here that your methodology doesn’t have bias. It is incumbent upon you to prove it.

You really ought to address the question of why your methodology indicates that in aggregate, there is strong evidence that View of the Hebrews is of ancient Mayan origin. Yes, I understand that if somebody has an arbitrarily high a priori belief against historicity that will be enough to swamp the evidence and maintain disbelief. But why is having a relatively strong a priori prejudice against the Mayan historicity of the View of the Hebrews required in order to disbelieve after looking at the evidence?

Bias inherent in your methodology would explain this. It would also explain why you had to turn to writings outside of The Maya to find most of the specific examples where Dr. Coe doesn’t think the Book of Mormon fits. For example, if there is no evidence that the Mayans had herds, there is no reason Dr. Coe would mention this fact in a book about the Maya. Yet it not being mentioned in that book doesn’t change the fact that herds in the Book of Mormon are an anachronism and should count as evidence against historicity. Anachronisms in the book will systematically not be mentioned in The Maya. Thus the statistical bias.

[_Gadianton]

Thanks H, that post by Billy Shears on the calendar is epic. As I've said before, Billy Shears is a personal hero of mine. What a great intellect and communicator! No wonder the SeN commentors loathe him!

[_Physics Guy]

Just in case this stuff about issues not being independent is unclear to some people, the calendar is a great example.

If Smith were randomly guessing each little feature of his fictional Nephite society, he might run his finger down the list of society features to "Government?" and take the wild guess of "theocratic monarchy," after flirting seriously with anarcho-communism in the list of 50 plausible options. Next up is "Religious observances?" and in the list of fifty equally fair answers he thinks hard about hot tubs, or maybe ritual humming, but finally settles on sacrifices in temples. On to "Timekeeping?" where he plumps wildly for a day/month/year system, choosing at random out of the fifty competitive options from digital watches to mass procrastination. If that were Smith's procedure then there might really be odds of 50x50x50 against his landing on the particular set of three features that are in the Book of Mormon.

If Smith were simply trying to put Biblical Israelites into the Americas, however, he'd have picked theocratic monarchy AND temple sacrifice AND lunar calendar, all in one package at once, because that's what the Bible says the Israelites had. So his only actual guess would have been under "Source?", when he picked "Bible" instead of "Bhagavad Gita" or "The New York Times". That was only one guess, not three or 130, and it was hardly even a 50-to-1.

[_Arc]

His latest post is a nice, narrative caution outlining why the Dales may want to reconsider having this publication attributable to them and easily discovered on the web. I won't quote it, but it's worth a visit to the comments to read.

Using professional credentials in an attempt to lend credibility to pseudoscience nonsense in the public domain, as the Dales have chosen to do with the Interpreter paper, is never a good idea. There can be real world consequences for scientists who are listed as authors.

Published and well respected scientific staff are a technology company asset. When these assets publicly damage their own credibility, they erode the reputation of the company they work for.

There can be problems all around if the poorly conceived and executed material they author, even as a hobby, attracts the attention of persons who may be clients, or potential clients, of the author's employer.

The longer the debate on the internet continues, and the deeper hole the authors dig for themselves defending what is an increasingly indefensible position, the more likely it is that there will be consequences in the real world.

The internet can be forever. The only rational decision for two Ph.D. authors who stumble into such an ambush, and value their careers, is to pull the publication and request that the Interpreter flush the whole sordid mess, paper, comments and all, down the memory hole. All involved on the LDS side here should simply follow the example set by their Mormon leaders, who are adept at using the memory hole whenever deemed expedient.


Having commented about to Dales' paper directly on the Interpreter site to no avail, this comment is posted here.

[_DrW]

The Dales have a real disaster on their hand. The remainder of this post has been deleted in the firm belief that caution is the better part of valor.