The Interpreter; Bayes Theorem; Nephites and Mayans

[Guest]

I'm shocked. Where to even start with this...

Bruce Dale, June 16,

Honorentheos, vide supra. The fact that many ancient belief systems consisted of ying and yang pairs or their equivalents is another mark in favor of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. We never said that the Book of Mormon was unique… you apparently want to claim that…

ETA: I guess I would start be being cheeky, and asking if this means he'll downgrade the correspondence to just being specific and detailed, then?

[_honorentheos]

Bruce apparently went back and replied to posts over a month old, making the discussion like a brush fire throwing out sparks being carried around by the wind. They apparently traded in quality of response for the quantity as well. So I'll skip Bruce's June 16 reply to a comment made by Billy back on May 8th and let Billy's response fill in the gaps:

Hi Bruce,

Let me try one last time to explain the specific problem I see here. Your “specific, detailed, and unusual” criteria for determining a likelihood ratio is a heuristic for estimating a likelihood ratio. I presume that this heuristic works reasonably well in medical imaging, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it works reasonably well when trying to determine the provenance of a text. When applying this, you should keep in mind what the likelihood ratio actually is. A score of 0.02 does NOT mean that you subjectively determined that an alleged point of correspondence is “specific, detailed, and unusual.” What it actually means is that the piece of evidence is 50-times more likely to be observed if the Book of Mormon is from ancient Mesoamerica as it is to be observed if the Book of Mormon is not from Mesoamerica.

If you keep in mind that the two hypotheses are exhaustive and non-overlapping and are: A- the Book of Mormon is fiction and B- the Book of Mormon is non-fiction, then you should be able to see and admit how silly it is to claim that the protestant Christianity that permeates the Book of Mormon is a specific, detailed, and unusual piece of evidence that counts strongly in favor of the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon is non-fiction. The protestant Christianity and specific religious issues the book discusses are specific to Joseph Smith’s day and place. The suggestion that the Maya religion has some broad similarity to Christianity constitutes very strong evidence in favor of historicity is silly.

Best,

Billy

[_Lemmie]

honorentheos, thanks for following up on this. The more Bruce posts, the more obvious it becomes that he has no understanding at all of the mathematical underpinnings of statistical analysis.

So, although we didn’t talk in depth about this “exhaustive” treatment issue in the paper, it is certainly not a weakness of the paper or the methodology.

Jared, can we suggest that perhaps you are making a mountain out of a molehill? You apparently want us to further partition the “fiction” hypothesis into “fiction written by Joseph Smith” and “fiction written by person X, or Y or Z” etc.

Unbelievable. Bruce thinks making the hypothesis "exhaustive" involves bringing in more authors of fiction?

Here's the problem, Bruce. Your hypothesis H = Book of Mormon fiction. Your "not-H" is Book of Mormon NOT fiction. So far, so good.

The problem is that you did not sample the Book of Mormon to test that hypothesis. You PICKED 131 non-fiction statements from ONE single book, about Meso-American cultures, using the criterion that the Book of Mormon coincidentally (sort of) matched those Meso-American attributes. You purposely left out EVERY SINGLE STATEMENT FROM THE Book of Mormon THAT DID NOT MATCH those Meso-American attributes. That is why your hypothesis testing is not exhaustive, because you invalidated the procedure by picking elements that sampled NOT the question, "is the Book of Mormon fiction," but rather "does the Book of Mormon match various Meso-American attributes from a time period spanning many more years than the Book of Mormon, as noted in ONE book." Nlot only did you NOT sample your hypothesis data set, you didn't even fairly sample the limited data set that does not match your hypothesis!!

Then, to be "fair" you came up with 18 statements that did not match, NOT from the Book of Mormon, but from casual, non-exhaustive statements the one author of the one book gave as "examples" of non-matches, NOT non-matches of "is the Book of Mormon fiction," but rather non-matches of "is the Book of Mormon meso-american"!!!

(If this was a group of my students, i would not allow them to turn in the paper until the statistics resembled some legitimate testing process. I would caution them that turning it in as is would warrant an F.)

This is really becoming embarrassing. Bruce Dale really does not understand statistical analysis, and I shudder to think who Allen Wyatt was referring to when he said this paper was peer reviewed by a statistician. It would probably be better to assume he was not being entirely honest, rather than consider that there is actually a professional LDS statistician out there who gave this paper the green light.

[_honorentheos]

My poor contributions pale compared to Billy's beast mode thumping, so I have little else to share but it's worth the time reading the 30+ new comments added over the weekend.

I did find Dr. Dale's comment to me odd that archeologists finding evidence of oyster harvesting and recognizing it for what it was would be a tough hill to climb. I felt it made for a good opportunity to remind him that the BoMs hill was infinitely steeper, having claimed pearls where none were proven to have been found. He's a bit overeager in pursuing a point and leaves the back of the board open to attack I've noticed. And to exchange chess metaphors for hiking ones.

[_honorentheos]

Lemmie, there's a comment in there that really tops off what you are getting after. I didn't copy it over but at one point over the weekend, he defends both the exhaustive AND limited nature of the study in the same paragraph. It's amazing.

[_Lemmie]

I'm shocked. Where to even start with this...

Bruce Dale, June 16,

Honorentheos, vide supra. The fact that many ancient belief systems consisted of ying and yang pairs or their equivalents is another mark in favor of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. We never said that the Book of Mormon was unique… you apparently want to claim that…

ETA: I guess I would start be being cheeky, and asking if this means he'll downgrade the correspondence to just being specific and detailed, then?

SMH. The number of times Bruce Dale has completely contradicted himself is just bizarre. his ad hoc justifications are completely inconsistent. That tells me he really does not understand the math at all. If he did, his explanations, right or wrong, would at least be mathematically consistent.

[_Lemmie]

Lemmie, there's a comment in there that really tops off what you are getting after. I didn't copy it over but at one point over the weekend, he defends both the exhaustive AND limited nature of the study in the same paragraph. It's amazing.

Why does that not surprise me? I'll take a look. Thanks again, for summarizing, and thanks also to Billy Shears. His efforts are approaching a Jenkins level of professional smack-down.

[_Bret Ripley]

This is really becoming embarrassing.

I respectfully disagree: they flew past embarrassing about 15 exits ago.

It is surreal. I kind of feel like I'm watching the end of 'Thelma and Louise' in excruciatingly slow motion with the sound turned down. Only instead of driving a '66 Thunderbird off that cliff, it's a 1972 AMC Pacer.

[_honorentheos]

Billy,
I think you are referring here to the “exhaustive” treatment requirement of Bayesian analysis. I addressed that issue today (June 16) in a post to Jared Manning. Our Bayesian analysis is indeed exhaustive.

If you think that “all evidence” means all evidence from all sources, we strongly disagree but only with respect to this paper. Our paper considers only a limited set of facts, those which are dealt with by both the Book of Mormon and by The Maya.

Coe has claimed that the Book of Mormon has nothing to do with ancient Indian culture. Wrong, Dr. Coe.

According to his book the Book of Mormon has a lot to do with ancient Mesoamerican Indian cultures, whereas two books written about the same time (Manuscript Found and View of the Hebrews) have little to nothing to do with ancient Mesoamerican Indian cultures as Coe describes them.

If you want to consider ALL evidence for or against the Book of Mormon, then bring it on. I can hardly wait to talk about tumbaga, Nahom, the Land Bountiful on the coast of Oman, 50 men being the standard military unit in the Book of Mormon (and the Old Testament), “river of water” and a zillion more pieces of evidence for Book of Mormon that are not dealt with in Coe’s book–so I could not include them one way or the other.

Please recall that I included as evidence against the Book of Mormon a number of points that Coe’s book says nothing about. So I have already done in part what you want to do.

But if we go further down that road, you will have to allow me to bring in all the evidence in favor of the Book of Mormon. Your job will be to bring in all of the negative evidence.

Bruce

I guess it wasn't the same paragraph, but close.

[_Lemmie]

This is really becoming embarrassing.

I respectfully disagree: they flew past embarrassing about 15 exits ago.

I concede your point.

It is surreal. I kind of feel like I'm watching the end of 'Thelma and Louise' in excruciatingly slow motion with the sound turned down. Only instead of driving a '66 Thunderbird off that cliff, it's a 1972 AMC Pacer.

Yes. Especially when Shears explains things like this:

A score of 0.02 does NOT mean that you subjectively determined that an alleged point of correspondence is “specific, detailed, and unusual.” What it actually means is that the piece of evidence is 50-times more likely to be observed if the Book of Mormon is from ancient Mesoamerica as it is to be observed if the Book of Mormon is not from Mesoamerica.

That's how you know Bruce Dale does not understand the math.