The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[_Res Ipsa]

Just remember: parallelomania in Bayesian drag.

[_Tom]

K. Magleby, executive director of Book of Mormon Central, recently blogged about the Dales’ article.

The smart folks at Interpreter (Dan Peterson, Allen Wyatt, Brant Gardner) anticipated a blockbuster, so they kept this article in peer review for over a year where it was polished by both Mesoamericanists and statisticians. When the provocative piece was finally published a month ago, reactions were fast and furious. Anti-Mormons masquerading behind pen names went ballistic trying to do damage control. Hyper skeptical cultural Mormons went nuts trying to invent counter explanations. True believers like me cheered loudly and long to see our favorite book so convincingly vindicated. The Dales managed the comment parade with aplomb. What is not to like about a genuine intellectual free-for-all with eternal salvific overtones?

And the comments, 300+ and counting, just keep comping. This is the most heavily commented article Interpreter has ever published. A response has just been posted (agrees with the conclusion, disagrees with the statistical methodology). This is a terrific article that will have a lasting impact on Book of Mormon studies. At 110 pages with appendices, footnotes, logic, and math, it is not for the faint of heart, but it is well worth the effort.

“Peer review for over a year where it was polished by both Mesoamericanists and statisticians”? LOL. I’d like to see the submitted version.

[_Lemmie]

A side comment on professionalism. It is not professional to suggest commenters have not read the paper. The Dales have done this , and it reflects very badly on the professionalism of the authors, but also on the Journal itself.

By my count the authors have responded to comments and questions in the comments section by asking some variation of "have you read the paper," "the whole paper," "the appendices," "the Book of Mormon," "carefully," "all the way through," and "enough," about 25 times. The editors as well chipped another 5 or so "have you read the paper?"

There is nothing in any comment that the authors could not have answered without resorting to this unprofessional tactic.


The latest version:

Bruce E. Dale on June 9, 2019 at 11:29 am said:

Andrew,

Let me see if I can respond directly to some of your comments.

1) Yes, we have had to repeat ourselves often in this thread because many of the commentators have neglected to read our paper before commenting on it. I am not sure yet if you are in that group. Perhaps you will tell us directly in your next post whether or not you have read the whole paper and the Appendices.

The authors also note in the paper and in the comments more than ten times that they don't think Dr. Coe read the Book of Mormon enough times, well enough, properly enough, sufficiently enough, etc. This is a well respected Mayan expert they are denigrating.

From yesterday's comment:

Dr. Coe failed in his scholarly duty to treat the Book of Mormon seriously. If you are going to claim to be a scholar, then you need to act like a responsible scholar.

Reminds me of a comment Jenkins made, when debating Hamblin:

But here’s the problem. If I look at the Book of Mormon as a historical text, as opposed to a spiritual document, it is simply not factually correct in any particular. In some controversial exchanges, I have been surprised to find how many clearly educated and literate Mormons think that the work can be defended as a work of history and archaeology. It can’t. The reason mainstream historians and scholars do not point out that fact more often is either that they are unaware of the book’s claims, or that they simply see no need to waste time on something so blatantly fictitious. This really is not debatable.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2015/05/mormons-and-new-world-history/

As for needing to read and read and re-read the Book of Mormon, another comment, this time about Carl Sagan, but still extremely applicable:

Some academic critics from outside the physical sciences still question how Sagan and other astronomers could reject Velikovsky without reading his books and carefully studying his ideas. Perhaps they don't understand how readily someone with sound technical training and physical intuition can recognize pseudoscience like that of Velikovsky. You don't have to consume an entire meal of spoiled food to recognize the problem -- one or two bites is enough. 

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/v ... m#Morrison

[_Maksutov]

A side comment on professionalism. It is not professional to suggest commenters have not read the paper. The Dales have done this , and it reflects very badly on the professionalism of the authors, but also on the Journal itself.

By my count the authors have responded to comments and questions in the comments section by asking some variation of "have you read the paper," "the whole paper," "the appendices," "the Book of Mormon," "carefully," "all the way through," and "enough," about 25 times. The editors as well chipped another 5 or so "have you read the paper?"

There is nothing in any comment that the authors could not have answered without resorting to this unprofessional tactic.


The latest version:

Bruce E. Dale on June 9, 2019 at 11:29 am said:

Andrew,

Let me see if I can respond directly to some of your comments.

1) Yes, we have had to repeat ourselves often in this thread because many of the commentators have neglected to read our paper before commenting on it. I am not sure yet if you are in that group. Perhaps you will tell us directly in your next post whether or not you have read the whole paper and the Appendices.

The authors also note in the paper and in the comments more than ten times that they don't think Dr. Coe read the Book of Mormon enough times, well enough, properly enough, sufficiently enough, etc. This is a well respected Mayan expert they are denigrating.

From yesterday's comment:

Dr. Coe failed in his scholarly duty to treat the Book of Mormon seriously. If you are going to claim to be a scholar, then you need to act like a responsible scholar.

Reminds me of a comment Jenkins made, when debating Hamblin:

But here’s the problem. If I look at the Book of Mormon as a historical text, as opposed to a spiritual document, it is simply not factually correct in any particular. In some controversial exchanges, I have been surprised to find how many clearly educated and literate Mormons think that the work can be defended as a work of history and archaeology. It can’t. The reason mainstream historians and scholars do not point out that fact more often is either that they are unaware of the book’s claims, or that they simply see no need to waste time on something so blatantly fictitious. This really is not debatable.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/anxiousbench/2015/05/mormons-and-new-world-history/

As for needing to read and read and re-read the Book of Mormon, another comment, this time about Carl Sagan, but still extremely applicable:

Some academic critics from outside the physical sciences still question how Sagan and other astronomers could reject Velikovsky without reading his books and carefully studying his ideas. Perhaps they don't understand how readily someone with sound technical training and physical intuition can recognize pseudoscience like that of Velikovsky. You don't have to consume an entire meal of spoiled food to recognize the problem -- one or two bites is enough. 

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/science/v ... m#Morrison

You don't see historians and scientists trying to confirm the Oahspe or the Urantia Book or any of the thousands of other channeled works....

More and more the Mopes remind me of the still extant defenders of the UFO contactees like George Adamski, who claimed to have been taken to the Moon on a flying saucer and seen lakes and forests and people living there.

[_Res Ipsa]

Any Quakers?

[_Arc]

Dr. Coe failed in his scholarly duty to treat the Book of Mormon seriously. If you are going to claim to be a scholar, then you need to act like a responsible scholar.

If Dr. Dale fancies himself a scholar and considers his Interpreter paper a scholarly work, then he should act like a scholar and take responsibility for his nonsense in the real world of scholarship.

Surely taking responsibility would include making sure the Interpreter paper is included on the publication list attached to his resume, as well as being cited on his Google Scholar page.

If the paper really is the blockbuster that K. Magleby claims DCP and his colleagues at the Interpreter believe it to be, who knows, perhaps it could turn the whole discipline of Mesoamerican history on its head.

[_Maksutov]

Dr. Coe failed in his scholarly duty to treat the Book of Mormon seriously. If you are going to claim to be a scholar, then you need to act like a responsible scholar.

If Dr. Dale fancies himself a scholar and considers his Interpreter paper a scholarly work, then he should act like a scholar and take responsibility for his nonsense in the real world of scholarship.

Surely taking responsibility would include making sure the Interpreter paper is included on the publication list attached to his resume, as well as being cited on his Google Scholar page.

If the paper really is the blockbuster that K. Magleby claims DCP and his colleagues at the Interpreter believe it to be, who knows, perhaps it could turn the whole discipline of Mesoamerican history on its head.

Dr. Coe not a "responsible scholar"? But the defenders of Mormonia, on whatever continent in whatever parallel universe it may be, squeezed in between Atlantis and Lemuria, are.

[_Gadianton]

However, in this correspondence, even though the five words "gold and silver, and precious stones" are in the quote, the Dales argue that because Joseph Smith did NOT define the precious stones incorrectly, this is a positive correspondence of the highest order. EVEN THOUGH SMITH STATED TWO ELEMENTS THAT DID NOT EXIST IN THE MAYA AT THE TIME, when he mentioned "gold and silver, and precious stones."

AND even worse, he mentioned curelom's and cumoms. Meaningless to anyone who reads the Book of Mormon, but nevertheless, the Lord saw that they were put in there anyway, so they have no grounds whatsoever to suggest he'd be vague. But as it would have been, it would not have been like curelom's and cumoms, and would have meant something to most readers.

But yeah to top it off, that they'd make it a .02 -- wow.

[_Everybody Wang Chung]

I'm not in academia, but a 1 year peer review process seems ridiculously long.

What is the average time period to peer reviewed an article?

[_Lemmie]

Brad Anderson, 3 days ago, asked how peer review could have not caught the mistake the Dales made in using contemporary data to find a match to Book of Mormon times. (The error is discussed here.)

Brad Anderson

on June 7, 2019 at 9:17 pm said:

Billy Shears wrote:

“The Maya
The quote from The Maya is from Chapter 10, “The Enduring Maya.” This chapter describes what the Maya is like today, nearly 500 years after the initial conquest began. It says, “the various Maya groups have clearly assimilated and altered many disparate foreign, and even threatening, elements to fit their own cultural patterns inherited from the pre-Conquest era.” "

Wow, this is a huge problem for the article. Shouldn’t an error this glaring have been addressed at the peer review level?

Despite Allen Wyatt’s assurances, I’m having huge doubts this was peer reviewed. How else can you explain something like Billy Shears just discussed?

There has been no response to this. Given that Magleby has stated that Peterson, Wyatt and Gardner kept this article in peer review for a year, one has to wonder what statistician reviews a paper for a year and yet fails to pick up on so many errors. Additionally, the methodology errors in the paper are virtually unfixable, so what was the reviewer doing for a year?

(Speaking of errors, why didn't the statistician reviewing the paper notice that 9 correspondences relied on "lowland Maya" data, while a 10th correspondence kept its 0.02 value by arguing that the Book of Mormon "doesn't claim to be set in lowland Maya"??? The list of errors, large and small, goes on and on. A year in peer review should not have let these slide.)