$30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

[Lem]

Regarding "length":

But it shows how it would be reasonable for someone to pick up the Book of Mormon and get the sense that they should take it seriously. It sets the first block in a foundation of reasoned skepticism—not skepticism of the church’s truth claims (there’s plenty of that to go around), but a skepticism that questions the claim that the Book of Mormon is a modern artifact of nineteenth-century origin.

I would like to speak to the person who picks up a book and BECAUSE IT IS LONG gets the sense they should take it seriously.

I would also like to speak to any other person who decides that a large number of words entails skepticism that it could be of nineteenth century origin.

I feel like I am mocking KR quite a bit, but how else does one respond to such nonsense?

KR needs to prove, or at least present evidence, that outliers in terms of length are documents not written by the author, but are documents from supernatural sources. He can't, but he needs to at least try to support his premise.

[Dr Moore]

I would like to speak to the person who picks up a book and BECAUSE IT IS LONG gets the sense they should take it seriously.

A valuable point. As a second-time author, does the Book of Abraham violate the length=rarity rule? Is that a "clue" that the Book of Abraham is to be taken less seriously?

What about the 10 commandments? Poor Moses.

And Jesus, with no book at all? How could the people be faulted for doubting him? What gives?

I'm leading up to a point here... like the real number line has infinite possible numbers in between ANY two numbers no matter how close together they are, there are probably infinite ways to scope the Book of Mormon so as to make it "rare odds" for just any Joe to produce. Or, for that matter, any book ever written by anyone purporting to be mystically-endowed.

[Gadianton]

I would like to speak to the person who picks up a book and BECAUSE IT IS LONG gets the sense they should take it seriously.

Forget the fact that if he were plotting to copy the Bible, that a reasonable approach (though not the only approach) would be to make the chapters around the same length people are used to seeing in the Bible.

Shouldn't his alternative hypothesis be a control; chapter length of an average book, or chapter length of a pseudo-Bible given the desire to mimic the Bible?

[Dr Moore]

Forget the fact that if he were plotting to copy the Bible, that a reasonable approach (though not the only approach) would be to make the chapters around the same length people are used to seeing in the Bible.

Of course, and in that vein, book length vs time spent planning out the book. For Joseph, it was 4 years at least, telling stories about the plates, no? How long were other Bible fan fiction works, relative to 530 pages over 4 years?

[drumdude]

1 out of every 9 chapters in the Book of Mormon are lifted directly from the Bible, so since we’re playing loose and wild with orders of magnitude I say that swings the probability back from 1 in 1000 to 1 in 100.

I’ll be submitting my bayes analysis to Interpreter shortly.

[Gadianton]

using his formula and getting rid of the distracting prior, if you start by giving the Book of Mormon a 5% chance of being ancient, then upon learning that the chapter lengths are in the ballpark of the Bible he copied, and learning that most 1st time authors don't publish a book 500 pages, the needle is moved from 5% to 98%.

[Lem]

using his formula and getting rid of the distracting prior, if you start by giving the Book of Mormon a 5% chance of being ancient, then upon learning that the chapter lengths are in the ballpark of the Bible he copied, and learning that most 1st time authors don't publish a book 500 pages, the needle is moved from 5% to 98%.

[drumdude]

PH—Prior Probability of Ancient Authorship—We start with the assumption that the probability of ancient authorship is low to the point of vanishing (1 in 1040, or

p = 1.0 x 10-41


The author wants you to think he’s being generous here, but it’s useful to compare these probabilities with the orders of magnitude of other events.

1.0×10−183,800 - Rough first estimate of the probability of a monkey in front of a typewriter typing all the letters of Hamlet on the first try

8.07×10−67 Probability of shuffling a Standard 52-card deck in any specific order

3.9×10−9 Probability of an entry winning the jackpot in the Mega Millions multi-state lottery in the United States


We have a lot of room to pick a number out of a hat here. How do we compare the order of magnitude of the Book of Mormon being written by aliens to the Book of Mormon being written by Hebrews living in MezoAmerica? How about the possibility of the book materializing out of thin air due to quantum mechanical fluctuations?

[Analytics]

In terms of number of pages, the Book of Mormon is more like the Bible than a typical 19th century novel. Based on this fact in isolation, it is something on the order of 1,000 times more likely that the Book of Mormon really is an authentic ancient record and not a product of the 19th Century. Do I got that right?

Are we sure we aren't being trolled?

[Dr Moore]

In terms of number of pages, the Book of Mormon is more like the Bible than a typical 19th century novel.

This would be an interesting control, Analytics. Rather than look at original novels, look at derivative works. The Book of Mormon relies so heavily on the Bible, it really isn’t comparable to any of the original works listed in episode 1.