Heavy Dragonplate or Extra Thin Tissue Paper?

[Lem]

From the comments:

…You go ahead and detail a cogent theory for the 16th century origin of the Book of Mormon. Lay out every piece of evidence and argument you can muster. Provide concrete details for how it was written and how it ended up in Joseph’s hands. Promote it as the best hypothesis available. Then tell me whether you feel any less silly than if you’d argued for angels and gold plates. I know I’d feel about as uncomfortable as Neil Degrasse at a Flat Earth conference.

“Evidence score on this point: -1”

The next time you suggest that I’m ignoring evidence, I’m going to remember this moment. And I’m going to giggle uncontrollably.

Rasmussen’s professional reputation is shot. How do you write the above and expect to be taken seriously?

He is saying that anyone who tries to explain how Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon from a 15th century document should feel “about as uncomfortable as Neil Degrasse at a Flat Earth conference.”

But, Skousen’s evidence, without explanation, should increase one’s belief in the authenticity of the Book of Mormon by more than 20 orders of magnitude.

What is going on in this guy’s head?!!?

[malkie]

Kyler is revealing quite a bit in the comments. Here he tells Billy Shears that if the consequent probability =1 is too high, he can lower that one, and then all he has to do is tweak other values and he can still get the result he wants:

If a 1-in-a-million or 1-in-a-quadrillion consequent strikes your fancy, all I’d have to do is assume somewhat fewer missing characteristics or a marginally more reasonable mean for the Poisson, and I’d have a couple dozen more orders of magnitude to play with.

In that context, I feel fine using the consequent for rhetorical purposes–in this case, socializing the idea that Early Modern English isn’t necessarily weird from a faithful perspective….

If the math’s unreasonable or inappropriate, please tell me so…

He is assigning probabilities “for rhetorical purposes”? As in, he is making them up.

This tells me we are dealing with a person who already has a result he wants, and even as fake as the numbers already are, he has no problem sacrificing his integrity to artificially manipulate them even further to maintain that result. And the Interpreter is publishing this farce.

Oops - saying the quiet bit out loud!

"If cherry-picking isn't good enough, or if critics come up with something I didn't think of - no prob - I'll just tweak the numbers to set it all straight again.

So he has just admitted, amongst other things, to manipulating the numbers to make his hypothesis unbeatable. We knew (as discussed amply upthread) that that was what he was doing, but it's still a bit strange to see him lay it out so plainly and unapologetically.

[drumdude]

Capture.JPG

[Dr Moore]

Kyler is revealing quite a bit in the comments. Here he tells Billy Shears that if the consequent probability =1 is too high, he can lower that one, and then all he has to do is tweak other values and he can still get the result he wants:



He is assigning probabilities “for rhetorical purposes”? As in, he is making them up.

This tells me we are dealing with a person who already has a result he wants, and even as fake as the numbers already are, he has no problem sacrificing his integrity to artificially manipulate them even further to maintain that result. And the Interpreter is publishing this farce.

Oops - saying the quiet bit out loud!

"If cherry-picking isn't good enough, or if critics come up with something I didn't think of - no prob - I'll just tweak the numbers to set it all straight again.

So he has just admitted, amongst other things, to manipulating the numbers to make his hypothesis unbeatable. We knew (as discussed amply upthread) that that was what he was doing, but it's still a bit strange to see him lay it out so plainly and unapologetically.

Wow!! This is an incredible and devastating admission. To summarize, Kyler has set himself up like used car salesman, with multiple ways to get paid. Ask for a sticker discount, he makes it up on financing. Ask for a lower financing rate, he makes it up on a bundled warranty sale. His trade offs are Poisson parameters and consequent probability assumptions. It might work for the uninitiated, but to folks who’ve worked with large math models where many dials leads to greater errors, this is an absolutely revealing confession. I count this as fatal process error #8 that Kyler has admitted to. (yes I’m counting and yes each one is fatal)

[Lem]

Twice now, the comment section has deleted a response I gave to KR. Here is the first exchange:

lynn on September 3, 2021 at 4:33 pm

Rasmussen:”Summary. Taken together, the syntactic and semantic evidence of Early Modern English provide two strong, independent lines of evidence against Joseph authoring the Book of Mormon. The probability of seeing both kinds of evidence by chance would be the product of their respective probabilities, or p = 5.24 x 10-24.”

why do you consider finding Early Modern English syntax and Early Modern English semantic evidence in a text to be “strong, independent lines of evidence”?

Kyler Rasmussen on September 3, 2021 at 6:55 pm

Thanks Lynn. That’s a good question.

In short, the independence on those factors depends on the hypothesis we’re using. If you, like Billy, happen to be entertaining a hypothesis of 16th century origin, then syntax and semantics wouldn’t be independent–they’d both be closely intercorrelated aspects of the language as spoken by those in the Early Modern period.

However, for the hypothesis of 19th century fraud, those two things would be independent. If one was trying to imitate biblical style, it might be possible (though incredibly unlikely) to end up with a syntactic style that appeared to be truly archaic. But in doing so you would not be any more likely to pick up the extinct archaic word meanings found in the Book of Mormon. The same applied to the reverse scenario. Using words in ways that happened to be extinct and archaic, as rare as that would be, wouldn’t provide you with the ability to execute archaic syntax.

Now, there’s another hypothesis where those items wouldn’t be independent, and that’s a hypothesis that had Joseph consciously imitating–not biblical style–but the direct style and semantic choices of Early Modern English. Assuming that Joseph would be capable of such a thing, and would have a reason to do it (both of which I see as unlikely enough that they weren’t considered here), then those items would also not be independent.

Hypotheses matter folks!

I responded, but interestingly enough, after twice noting “your comment is awaiting moderation,” TWICE my response was deleted.


Here is my second attempt:

Lynn on September 3, 2021 at 9:18 pm

Your comment is awaiting moderation.

Let me try this again, it didn’t seem to work last time:

“ In short, the independence on those factors depends on the hypothesis we’re using. If you, like Billy, happen to be entertaining a hypothesis of 16th century origin, then syntax and semantics wouldn’t be independent–they’d both be closely intercorrelated aspects of the language as spoken by those in the Early Modern period.

However, for the hypothesis of 19th century fraud, those two things would be independent.”

You are incorrect. These two elements are both Early Modern English elements of Early Modern English text which inherently occur together. They are, as pieces of information contained in Early Modern English, NOT independent of each other.

As such, it is irrelevant what hypothesis you are considering when you are evaluating their dependence. You need to consider the elements themselves.

You are presenting them as independent pieces in support of your Early Modern English hypothesis, and that is an error on your part.

For you to present the possibility that the two types of language could not be BOTH imitated is an assumption on your part that you want to treat as factual, in order to argue independence.

Imposing your imagined possibilities as factual within the context of analysis is not appropriate statistical technique.

And for some reason, twice that comment was deleted. Why am I not surprised.

[Dr Moore]

Honest answer: he has no idea what Early Modern English means or doesn’t mean. He should have gone with that.

[Philo Sofee]

Why is Early Modern English such a sacred cow for apologists anyway? Is it one of those things that either proves mystical origin, or else has to be an automatically disqualifying anachronism?

Sunk cost fallacy. They have sunk nearly $240,000 into this complete waste of time project, effort, and paper.

[Philo Sofee]

They already know you Lem. It's why they are absolutely terrified of letting you in on the discussion over there. Dr. Moore has demolished this guy. PG has done so, Billy has crucified him, and now you crucify him upside down as the explanation point! This has got to be the single worse thing Interpreter has ever produced! It even is worse than the outright debacle of the last Bayes Theorem paper they "published."

[kyzabee]

Hi all!

Apologies if I've been neglecting you over here, but Billy enough was kind enough to let me know that he was taking a crack at my math for Episode 9. Figured I'd drop in and see how he did.

"Kyler found eight categories of “archaic and non-archaic syntactic features” that Carmack has curated."

Curated makes it sound like "cherry-picked", but that wouldn't be a particularly fair characterization. All of these are characteristics that have been identified by other historical linguists as characteristic of Early Modern English. From what I can tell, there aren't any of those characteristics that he's ignoring or trying to sweep under the rug. Nonetheless, my analysis assumes that there were a substantial amount that he missed that don't fit the narrative, just to be safe.

"It turns out that the answer is no—74.23% and 5.75% are far enough apart to know the underlying propensity of the authors to use archaic syntax really is different. And that, my friends, is the dragonplated evidence that leads critics to despair and increases the odds of the Book of Mormon being true by a factor of trillions of trillions."

Well, Billy misses the part where I adjust for the variation between the pseudobiblical works. Turns out they were all relatively similar to each other, and similarly rare, in the frequency with which they used archaic syntax. In that context, the Book of Mormon is a dramatic outlier--thus the probability estimate of one in trillions and trillions.

The biggest problem here that Billy doesn't point out is that 4 is a rather small sample size of pseudobiblical works. It would definitely be ideal to track down a much larger sample size to see if there are any out there that are more similar to the Book of Mormon, or that suggest a wider variability in the 19th century works. But taking to Carmack directly on that, his larger sample of 25 works shows a very similar pattern. And his analysis of specific syntactic patterns across thousands of books--using Nineteenth Century Collections Online, does nothing to suggest that you'd get that archaic syntax anywhere in the 19th century, whether or not one was trying to emulate biblical style.

"On a fundamental level, Kyler’s math is implicitly asserting with dragonplated certainty that modern books use archaic language precisely 5.75% of the time."

Billy's not quite right here. First, and most importantly, he's forgetting that I make the adjustment mentioned above. Second, the implicit assertion of the chi-square isn't that all modern books use archaic syntax 5.75% of the time. It's that all modern texts pull from the same general distribution of syntax, and that differences between those books in terms of syntax can be attributed to chance.

Billy is right to point out that the differences between the psuedobiblical books exceed what we'd expect just by chance as well, presumably because of those different syntactic choices. But Billy is glossing over the fact that differences between the Book of Mormon and pseudobiblical books are much, much larger than the differences within that set of books, which is reflected in my estimate.

"Different authors have different vernaculars. That’s all there is to it."

They do. It just so happens that the Book of Mormon's vernacular is far different from what we'd expect from the 19th century, and I estimate that unexpectedness at a (conservative) 23 orders of magnitude.

[kyzabee]

And for some reason, twice that comment was deleted. Why am I not surprised.

Not sure why that was, Lem. Probably because you submitted two very similar comments before the moderator had a chance to approve one of them.

I understand that you disagree with me in terms of the independence question, but just to keep the conversation in one place I'll keep my substantive replies over on Interpreter.

Glad you've been reading!