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

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MG 2.0
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by MG 2.0 »

Physics Guy wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:31 pm
To be fair, if someone in the 20th century had hand-made a transoceanic wooden submarine, that would indeed have made the Jaredite voyage more credible.
.

Thing is, as the story goes, the Jaredite vessel builders had a bit of help along the way from a creative intelligence AT LEAST as smart as we ‘moderns’. 😉

Regards,
MG
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by drumdude »

MG 2.0 wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:01 pm
drumdude wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:31 pm



LDS apologists had it so easy when all they had to debate was other crazy crazy evangelical christians.

They met their match with atheists who realize all of the books are equally ridiculous :lol:
Well, of course you’re entitled to that point of view.

Regards,
MG
To elaborate:

There is no objective test one can perform on miracles to verify if they are true or not. If you're willing to believe miracles to support Mormonism, then you must also believe them to support every other religion and supernatural claim.

This is why the Mormon ultimately falls back on Moroni's Promise, which essentially says "believe whatever makes you feel good."
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by Lem »

Dr Moore wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 3:30 pm
This episode 8 considers the historical probability of an internal story within the Book of Mormon, Lehi's boat ride to the Americas. Notably, KR's analysis excludes the "miracle" explanation about the construction of the ship and the success of Lehi's voyage (safely arrived, no death at sea). He arrives at roughly 1 in 100 odds against such a voyage succeeding, and therefore this counts as 2 orders of magnitude, or a -2 "evidence score" against the Book of Mormon being historical.

Now think about this for a minute... even if you are willing to accept the -2 evidence score at face value, what has Kyler done?

Well, I'd say by including this episode, KR has shot himself solidly in the other foot. Why?

Episode 8 considers an unusual, or hard to believe, story that is both entirely internal to the Book of Mormon and yet essential to its "truth" narrative.

Ah, well then. KR has opened the door wide open for ALL unusual, or hard to believe, or discomfortingly unverified, Book of Mormon stories to be likewise considered as contra-evidence, exclusive of "miracle" explanations.

There are dozens, if not hundreds, of similarly long-odds or contra-science stories in the Book of Mormon. What about the Jaredite boats? The Mulekite boats? The Tower of Babel? The millions of well-armed soldiers felled in wars? The 2,000 stripling sons? The meteoric population growth? The existence of fully-developed Christianity in the Americas before Jesus' birth? Nephi fooling Zoram? Deutero- and Tritio-Isaiah? A headless man doing pushups and gasping for breath? This isn't to say those are even the best examples. There are many.

It won't take very many of those stories being properly considered before the whole analysis falls into the abyss. If he started with 1 in 10^40 against, it might be that the internal evidence from the book itself -- being so focused on miracles -- drops the odds to 1 in 10^100 or 1 in 10^200 against by the time all of the internal miracle stories are properly adjudicated. But all of those other difficult internal evidences, Kyler chooses to ignore. Why ignore them, when he's included one? How is the Lehite voyage as one evidence against a valid dice roll to count, but all of the others are not? It's another fatally inconsistent process flaw in Kyler's Mopologetic pornography project.

He's painted himself into a corner on this Lehite voyage episode. Arguably, the smart move would have been to exclude all "internal" evidence from the Book of Mormon text because the Book of Mormon is book about miracles, and miracles are by definition the least likely things to have happened. But he didn't go that route, so now he's got to explain why he chose to count just one out of a veritable sea of internal evidences that count against historicity. His chosen path is literally no different from excluding the dice rolls he doesn't want, leaving the dice rolls he does want standing out with higher reported frequency.

So anyway, now Kyler has to choose one of three doors, if he's an honest statistical hobbyist.

(1) conduct the same Bayesian analysis on ALL unusual Book of Mormon stories (dozens, if not hundreds)
--or--
(2) rescind episode 8, backtrack his process to exclude internal evidence from the Book of Mormon (because it's a book about miracles) and address the consequences to the remainder of his 22 episode analysis
--or--
(3) admit to the project being an amateur cherry-picking production (and apologize for wasting the time of his readers)
Especially since the Dales are on record arguing that the likelihoods from multiple items from the Book of Mormon can be multiplied together to overwhelm the odds. Either he has to do the same in reverse here, completely overwhelming his analyses, or else he has to acknowledge that the Dales' analysis (fully backed by the Interpreter peer review process) is wrong, and then follow one of your three options.
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by Dr Moore »

Physics Guy wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 7:31 pm
To be fair, if someone in the 20th century had hand-made a transoceanic wooden submarine, that would indeed have made the Jaredite voyage more credible.
... with a swarm of bees inside, and remember there can be no deaths en route
... even better if 12 such subs make the journey safely
... and all 12 make landing on the same shore together
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by dastardly stem »

In discussing with Billy Shears in the comments, Kyler suggests:
Your use of the term “made” suggests something far more supernatural than I’m suggesting. God would need to have instructed Nephi on boat building and sailing (and experience would quickly have made experts of all of them), but that’s exactly what the text says happened, and, in my view, is an extremely minimal assumption in terms of what a divine being would be capable of.
he seems to just keep doing this. "it's possible this could have happened..."

"what about this...this, oh, this, and that."

"well God could have made that happen. I mean he's God, so it's still possible and all of that. and the text says that God did it, so I believe God."

IT's like, well yeah...if we assume God did it, then why is anyone evaluating anything. His arbitrary number plugging can't possibly get us anywhere on such assumptions. Once we assume God's involved every probability goes all the way up to whatever number we like.
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by Doctor Steuss »

Dr Moore wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:52 pm
... even better if 12 such subs make the journey safely
... and all 12 make landing on the same shore together
Off-topic, but I read that as 12-inch subs.

Now I'm hungry.
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by MG 2.0 »

drumdude wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:18 pm
MG 2.0 wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 8:01 pm


Well, of course you’re entitled to that point of view.

Regards,
MG
To elaborate:

There is no objective test one can perform on miracles to verify if they are true or not. If you're willing to believe miracles to support Mormonism, then you must also believe them to support every other religion and supernatural claim.

This is why the Mormon ultimately falls back on Moroni's Promise, which essentially says "believe whatever makes you feel good."
I’ve said here before that I’m willing to give the benefit of a doubt to those that claim miraculous interventions of God without having to pin “LDS” either before or after it. Unless I investigate further and come to believe or think otherwise.

My concern with your approach is that it puts you in a position where you are susceptible to disbelief in anything that smells ‘supernatural’. It all becomes bunk.

Regards,
MG
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by drumdude »

MG 2.0 wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 10:07 pm
My concern with your approach is that it puts you in a position where you are susceptible to disbelief in anything that smells ‘supernatural’. It all becomes bunk.
David Hume's definition of miracle is useful here. A miracle is anything that violates the laws of nature. When you suspect you have witnessed a miracle you should

1) Check to see if it's possible you have misinterpreted what you have seen
2) Check to see if your understanding of the laws of nature are incomplete

The faithful simply bypass all checks on their senses/logic/knowledge and jump straight to "it must have been a suspension of the laws of nature!"

Kyler and Mormonism are in much more of a bind than the typical Catholic or Evangelical, because the Mormon conception of God is bound by forces greater and more fundamental than Him. God, in Mormonism, simply organizes pre-existing material, and works within the existing framework of the laws of nature. So in Mormonism, a miracle wouldn't even be defined as a suspension of the laws of nature - it would instead be defined as a product of a higher intelligence having more sophisticated technological control over the Universe than we do.
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by malkie »

drumdude wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 10:18 pm
MG 2.0 wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 10:07 pm
My concern with your approach is that it puts you in a position where you are susceptible to disbelief in anything that smells ‘supernatural’. It all becomes bunk.
David Hume's definition of miracle is useful here. A miracle is anything that violates the laws of nature. When you suspect you have witnessed a miracle you should

1) Check to see if it's possible you have misinterpreted what you have seen
2) Check to see if your understanding of the laws of nature are incomplete

The faithful simply bypass all checks on their senses/logic/knowledge and jump straight to "it must have been a suspension of the laws of nature!"

Kyler and Mormonism are in much more of a bind than the typical Catholic or Evangelical, because the Mormon conception of God is bound by forces greater and more fundamental than Him. God, in Mormonism, simply organizes pre-existing material, and works within the existing framework of the laws of nature. So in Mormonism, a miracle wouldn't even be defined as a suspension of the laws of nature - it would instead be defined as a product of a higher intelligence having more sophisticated technological control over the Universe than we do.
From my PoV, "disbelief in anything that smells ‘supernatural’ " should be the default position, otherwise one may accept, uncritically, all sorts of outrageous claims, simply because they are attributed to a supernatural cause.
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MG 2.0
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Re: $30k challenge to Interpreter’s “Team Bayes”

Post by MG 2.0 »

drumdude wrote:
Tue Aug 31, 2021 10:18 pm
So in Mormonism, a miracle wouldn't even be defined as a suspension of the laws of nature - it would instead be defined as a product of a higher intelligence having more sophisticated technological control over the Universe than we do.
Something like that.

God.

Regards,
MG
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