I love it when our discussions end up on Reddit

[Marcus]

[–]Westwood_1[F] 10 points 1 day ago

Applying Bayesian reasoning

It's amazing how one experience can color your perceptions of something for the rest of your life. For example, I can't hear the phrase "Bayesian reasoning" without thinking of those two jokers, Dale and Dale, who published in the Interpreter regarding their "Bayesian" analysis that "proved" the Book of Mormon true (after heavily weighing any "supporting evidence" and discounting the weight of anything less positive).
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[–]ImFeelingTheUte-iest 8 points 1 day ago

I tried to tell those jokers how problematic their likelihood function was (I am a PhD statistician with expertise in Bayesian survival analysis) and they wouldn't hear a word of it. I tried to argue that they didn't have any experts inform their likelihood judgments so they were meaningless and they just doubled down that they were the arbiters of how likelihood outcomes were under different hypotheses and they didn't need expert assessment. Complete jokers.
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[–]LittlePhylacteries 4 points 1 day ago

I remember that episode. The prize that Dr. Moore offered up was a great way to demonstrate how far unjustifiable their analysis was.

First offer was $10,000

To win the prize, submissions must satisfy the following conditions:

Provide a proof, with data, that each probability is statistically independent (or if you prefer, uncorrelated or mathematically orthogonal) to each of the other probabilities.
Submit these proofs in writing.
Pass review by a current BYU statistics or stochastics professor of my choosing.
Then he reduced the burden:

If Team Bayes will have their papers reviewed and given publicly-signed statements of “clean process” when it comes to the statistical treatments, each by 2 current professors of statistics at BYU (or a higher ranked university), I will consider that good enough to award the prize for each paper.

Clean process in terms of:

Proper setup and evaluation of the Bayesian conditionals
Properly addressing statistical independence of multiplied probabilities
And when only one author actually engaged but still dismissed the very real problems with their work, there was a final prize offered directly to that author:

Since Kyler continues to dodge the essential challenge here, I will see his "red herring" and do him one better. I will award Kyler half of the challenge reward, $5,000, if he will simply will tackle independence among all of his Bayesian constructs with a reasoned logical analysis explaining why the components of his Bayesian conditionals should all be considered as independent processes from the components of his other Bayesian conditionals. That's it. Now, it will be a challenge to explain why Joseph is not correlated with Joseph amongst all 23 of these conditionals, but if Kyler is convinced, let's hear it. He can skip the controlled data experiments, if that work is too hard or he's too lazy to try, and still win half the prize. And if a BYU professor of my choosing reads it all and signs off on the reasonableness of "independence" in Kyler's work, then the $5k is his.

The prize money was never claimed, despite the incredibly generous and easy-to-meet terms. Well, easy to meet if the analysis was valid—impossible to meet if it's not.
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[–]RushclockAtheist [score hidden] 22 hours ago

I was disappointed when Kyler came up with this.

NET OVERALL EVIDENCE SCORE: 69 orders of magnitude in favor of authenticity.

At least he could've adjusted the priors to get 42 orders. 69 really?
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[–]LittlePhylacteries [score hidden] 22 hours ago
Might as well have made it 420. In for a penny, in for a dime bag.

This comment from Lem is interesting:

I seem to recall, in an off-hand comment, Kyler even admitting that if he changed the numbers to reflect a correction of one of Billy Spears' issues, he could just adjust other numbers to get right back to his "success."

As an academician, he should be extremely embarrassed at the amount of effort he put into a masssive, multi-part Texas Sharpshooter fallacy. But I strongly suspect he's not even aware of the fundamental flaws and fallacious reasoning he fabricated into the core of his argument.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mormon/comment ... e_book_of/

(I suspect Some of Us is Some of Them, and vice versa...)

Shout out to Dr. Moore, who offered a legitimate test, from which the mopologists scurried like shell-shocked mice. I suspect that's why the Dales' sequel to their Interpreter-published paper is languishing as an unpublished item at Book of Mormon Central. For once, it seems the Interpreter couldn't stomach passing through a nonsensical paper while simultaneously arguing they are solidly and academically peer-reviewed.

[Marcus]

From the same thread, a summing up of mopologist strategies:

[–]srichardbellrock 29 points 1 day ago*
Bayesian reasoning...

As a descriptive theory, I think that it captures our shifts in calculations of probabilities accurately.

But what happens when our prior probabilities are along the lines of

"Since the Church is ex hypothesi true, there can be no genuine evidence that it is false." (Denial C. Peterson)

or

"I start out with an assumption that the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon...is true. Therefore, any evidence I find, I will try to fit into that paradigm." (Kerry Muhlestein)

You are correct that "[a]ny dispassionate, third-party observer applying Bayesian reasoning would absolutely conclude that the Book of Mormon and Book of Abraham are fabrications."

But somehow, in this world of "doubt your doubts" so many of our faithful friends and family believe that applying objectivity is itself a form of bias, and openly stating your biases like Peterson and Muhlestein makes one somehow more trustworthy.
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[–]Wannabe_Stoic13 16 points 1 day ago*
so many of our faithful friends and family believe that applying objectivity is itself a form of bias

I'd add that so many of our faithful friends and family also believe that applying objectivity is a form of faithlessness and disloyalty, which I find absurd and insulting. If it's true it doesn't need my loyalty to exist... it will stand on its own. If it does stand, then it will deserve my loyalty, not the other way around. Likewise, I will put my faith in that thing which has shown that it deserves my faith.
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[–]MythicAcrobat [score hidden] 20 hours ago
Also by that standard, to realize any of the other thousands of religions/forms of belief are true or not, you’d have to give that same loyalty for an answer regarding them. And that is impossible with the amount of time we have to spend in our lives surviving in this world and making others survive to be able to apply that to each one. It makes no sense for a perfect all-knowing and all-loving God to have such an inefficient and unmerciful way for his children to determine knowledge.

[Philo Sofee]

Great stuff!!! Yes, it has become increasingly seriously ODD that if the Mopologists actually believed they had something credible, they would fall all over themselves to get it into a scholarly journal for the world would read. Why go with piddle when you can win the gold medal of excellent validating scholarship in favor of the Book of Mormon? Their very actions demonstrate conclusively they don't have validating scholarship or math, and they know it. They know it's a fob job. Criminy if it was the real deal, the GA's would be touting it from the pulpit at the General Conferences.

[Wonhyo]

Great stuff!!! Yes, it has become increasingly seriously ODD that if the Mopologists actually believed they had something credible, they would fall all over themselves to get it into a scholarly journal for the world would read. Why go with piddle when you can win the gold medal of excellent validating scholarship in favor of the Book of Mormon? Their very actions demonstrate conclusively they don't have validating scholarship or math, and they know it. They know it's a fob job. Criminy if it was the real deal, the GA's would be touting it from the pulpit at the General Conferences.

Philo, I don't have nearly the Mopologist-watching experience as other members of this board. But from what I have observed, the Mopologists play it safe and bounce their theories and ideas principally off one another instead of pushing their luck in the peer-reviewed academy. This is because their theories and ideas do not pass scholarly muster - at least not as actual scholars define the concept.

DCP and his band of proud boys have labored for decades on their sardonic Mopologetics, and have left a wake of un-Christian turmoil behind them as they trawl the dark waters of Mormonism. In a strange way, I owe DCP quite a lot for unwittingly helping me to wake up and see Mormonism as the house of cards that it is.

[Dr. Shades]

Great stuff!!! Yes, it has become increasingly seriously ODD that if the Mopologists actually believed they had something credible, they would fall all over themselves to get it into a scholarly journal for the world would read. Why go with piddle when you can win the gold medal of excellent validating scholarship in favor of the Book of Mormon? Their very actions demonstrate conclusively they don't have validating scholarship or math, and they know it. They know it's a fob job. Criminy if it was the real deal, the GA's would be touting it from the pulpit at the General Conferences.

Philo, I don't have nearly the Mopologist-watching experience as other members of this board. But from what I have observed, the Mopologists play it safe and bounce their theories and ideas principally off one another instead of pushing their luck in the peer-reviewed academy. This is because their theories and ideas do not pass scholarly muster - at least not as actual scholars define the concept.

Yeah, that’s pretty much what he said.

[Wonhyo]

Philo, I don't have nearly the Mopologist-watching experience as other members of this board. But from what I have observed, the Mopologists play it safe and bounce their theories and ideas principally off one another instead of pushing their luck in the peer-reviewed academy. This is because their theories and ideas do not pass scholarly muster - at least not as actual scholars define the concept.

Yeah, that’s pretty much what he said.

Thanks, Shades!

[Rivendale]

42 vs 69 orders of magnitude. Rushclock has been watching conversations here. Oh what a tangled web we weave.

[Marcus]

Great stuff!!! Yes, it has become increasingly seriously ODD that if the Mopologists actually believed they had something credible, they would fall all over themselves to get it into a scholarly journal for the world would read. Why go with piddle when you can win the gold medal of excellent validating scholarship in favor of the Book of Mormon? Their very actions demonstrate conclusively they don't have validating scholarship or math, and they know it. They know it's a fob job. Criminy if it was the real deal, the GA's would be touting it from the pulpit at the General Conferences.

Lol. Too true. Although there is one interesting thing I am hoping maybe Dr. Scratch or someone will look into further. The Dales actually wrote a follow up paper to their greatest guesser fiasco, where they tried to address issues such as independence. They even pulled in another Mayan reference, and then tracked at least 9 editions of Coe's book. Of course they didn't really fix any of the statistical issues, or the huge issues of interpretation of meanings and arbitrary probability assignments, but of course they still concluded to a ridiculous probability that the Book of Mormon was not fiction.

The most interesting part, however, is that this paper is languishing at Book of Mormon Central, as a self-designated "unpublished paper."
(link: https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org ... r-all-time )

So why didn't the Interpreter publish it? Did their statistical "experts" realize they couldn't put this nonsense through again, and refuse to participate? Did some editor have a glimmer of good sense at the "peer-reviewed journal" and pull the plug? As far as my limited reading goes, the Dales' paper was written about more extensively than any other Interpreter offering, and the discussions were uniformly and overwhelmingly negative about the reputation of the Interpreter for publishing such a ridiculous paper.

I know you've had more experience than I have Philo (by FAR!!!!), I'd love to hear your take on why the Dales' follow up paper didn't seem to make it into the Interpreter, and the possible effect on the Journal's reputation because of this situation?