Note that a "true positive" would correlate to items in the Book of Mormon that he argues match the items in the Maya book. A "false positive" would correlate to his very small list of items mentioned in the Book of Mormon that Coe mentioned are not Mayan.Bruce on November 9, 2013 at 9:23 pm
There is another (but still equivalent) form of Bayes rule that might make this point more clearly and less controversially than the form in the blog above:
odds(H|E)/odds(H) = prob(E|H)/prob(E|H*)
We don’t need to guess individual values for any of the quantities here to show how Bayes’ rule can help us in thinking about The Late War and Book of Mormon authorship and influence questions.
This equation says that the ratio of (posterior odds of H to prior odds of H) is equal to the ratio of the [probability of a true positive (sensitivity) to the probability of a false positive (specificity)]. If a true positive is much more likely than a false positive, the posterior odds increases relative to the prior odds. If a true positive is about as likely as a false positive, the posterior odds stays about the same as the prior odds.
This is important in the Late War situation because there is not much information about how sensitive and specific the Johnsons’ procedures are. In my opinion, sensitivity is decreased and specificity is increased by at least two features of the Johnsons’ study:
1. the massive search model tends to produce false positives.
2. the dependence of weights on a randomly selected corpus (from books of many genres between 1500 and 1830) tends to affect sensitivity and specificity in unpredictable ways; I can conceive of ways in which sensitivity is decreased and specificity is increased.....
https://interpreterfoundation.org/blog- ... of-Mormon/
Notice he says "I can conceive of ways in which sensitivity is decreased and specificity is increased....."
And also the reverse, such as, having 130+ items in the numerator, and less than 20 in the denominator, and then assuming independence so elements in both can be multiplied.
I am simplifying the process a little, but I really think that Bruce Dale originally began this analysis because he was sure he had came up with a sneaky way to skew the results in his favor. I think he just didn't count on getting caught in such blatant manipulation.
You’ll notice Rasmussen’s entire analysis also relies on this gimmick, as Physics Guy explained in discussing KR’s strategy. It’s about as dishonest a way to use stats as one can come up with. But the Interpreter says all the works under discussion here passed their “rigorous” peer review with flying colors. No one wants to verify that, however. No surprise there.