Carmack's current position on Book of Mormon authorship

[Limnor]

The assumption here is the book is a translation from some unknown ancient language into deliberately archaic English. It assumes that is a fact, but calling it a “translation” is a claim, not evidence. There are better explanations for inconsistencies—like Joseph was pretending he could speak in KJV English while describing events in his life—it was his pretending that was inconsistent, not any non-existent original Reformed Egyptian variations.

Why would there be variations in the original Reformed Egyptian that result in differing archaic transmission? Answer: there is no such thing as Reformed Egyptian, but you’d expect variation in dictation.

[Gadianton]

That's a very good point Reverend, I totally forgot about that. I do feel like Smith gets put into a conundrum as he tries to simultaneously solve multiple problems, such as awareness about about personal writing ability perhaps, and how to get ahead of that problem while still claiming to write a perfect book. But certainly needs to be taken into account.

[Kishkumen]

That's a very good point Reverend, I totally forgot about that. I do feel like Smith gets put into a conundrum as he tries to simultaneously solve multiple problems, such as awareness about about personal writing ability perhaps, and how to get ahead of that problem while still claiming to write a perfect book. But certainly needs to be taken into account.

It is an oddly contradictory situation. The Book of Mormon is an improvement on the Bible but inferior in some respects? Tough spot.

[Equality]

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[Gadianton]

In some free time I've stumbled upon over the last few days I've dusted off my old scripting environment built for the task of reading the Book of Mormon for me. It's slow going because my comp keeps going into sleep mode on the Book of Mormon material though it seems okay with everything else. Well anyway, as I work around that, I've been exploring pre-built text tools I didn't use in the past. I have to say that the primary challenge is finding ways to get results that feel dependable. Bias, not just ideological bias, but not-knowing-wtf-you're doing bias is more of a problem than I thought. It's easy to get output that's intuitive and seems right but it's wrong, or perform an intuitive test that produces junk. The thought I keep having is that the bleeding-edge kind of analysis that Carmack and Skousen are doing is doomed if for no other reason than the sheer amount of calibration that would be necessary to feel confident that the method is solid. They seem to rely on their knowledge of linguistic theory but have they ever shown examples where that theory can reliably date texts where the date and authorship is pretty well uncontested?

The fact that they blow off the "curious workmanship" slam-dunk between the Book of Mormon and Late War and think "if it so be" is mathematically impossible makes me think they won't put too much effort into calibration.

[I Have Questions]

Will Interpreter be throwing money at Carmack going forward, like they’ve been throwing it at Skousen?

[Gadianton]

I was alerted to this article and wondered what Marcus or anybody else may know about this. The bolded claim is this:

The Berkeley Group found a 1 in 15 trillion chance that Nephi and Alma were written by the same author

How is it that anytime I see odds this bad that they always relate to either the Book of Mormon not being ancient (or some step in evolution occurring by chance)? Anyways, after having a good laugh over how incompetent and shameless the Berkeley team must be to publish something like that, assuming they did and this nonsense claim wasn't the contribution of an apologist, I will say that my own "research" indicates that Nephi and Alma might be different authors. This theory about Nephi and Alma apparently goes back a while?

Does it predate Carmack? I'm assuming it does. And if so, then boy, this is a problem, because it means that Carmack already had a hint about where to look for "meaningful" phrases that would distinguish GhostA from GhostB.

GhostB:Mosiah/helaman/Alma/3d Nephi 1-7?
GhostA:all else

[I Have Questions]

I was alerted to this article and wondered what Marcus or anybody else may know about this. The bolded claim is this:

The Berkeley Group found a 1 in 15 trillion chance that Nephi and Alma were written by the same author

How is it that anytime I see odds this bad that they always relate to either the Book of Mormon not being ancient (or some step in evolution occurring by chance)? Anyways, after having a good laugh over how incompetent and shameless the Berkeley team must be to publish something like that, assuming they did and this nonsense claim wasn't the contribution of an apologist, I will say that my own "research" indicates that Nephi and Alma might be different authors. This theory about Nephi and Alma apparently goes back a while?

Does it predate Carmack? I'm assuming it does. And if so, then boy, this is a problem, because it means that Carmack already had a hint about where to look for "meaningful" phrases that would distinguish GhostA from GhostB.

GhostB:Mosiah/helaman/Alma/3d Nephi 1-7?
GhostA:all else

My understanding is that it was published back in the day, but that John Hilton and the few people who decided to informally call themselves “The Berkeley Group” suffered a credibility hit as a result. The resounding and universal criticisms centred around poor methodology, blatant bias, unsafe conclusions etc. I’m pretty sure you will struggle to find anyone (other than FAIR) who takes it seriously as a piece of research. They obviously started with a conclusion and then tried to cherry pick data to make their conclusion appear valid. It was shoddy stuff, apparently.

Hilton and Carmack both make the same “mistake” in assuming that “multiple writing styles = multiple ancient authors”. That’s not the case. That’s not a conclusion that can be drawn from either study. I’d imagine that you could use that methodology and find a case for multiple authors in, say, the writings of Tolkien and even Rowling. Hemingway and Carroll. They fail to consider the other reasons for why writing styles may change.

[Gadianton]

Hilton and Carmack both make the same “mistake” in assuming that “multiple writing styles = multiple ancient authors”

You must be right that this is a super old finding, from the 90s even? But here's the thing, Carmack and Hilton actually contradict each other, in fact, as I'm delving into this research independently (back in the 90s it might have taken talent to do but not now), I'm wondering if Skousen and Carmack and the Ghost theory is a reaction to the laughable failure of earlier studies.

The Hilton study is claiming multiple ancient authors, essentially, one for each book of the Book of Mormon. This is the most naïve take on scriptures possible, which of course is the Chapel Mormon understanding. Nephi wrote a diary, Jarom wrote a diary, Omni wrote a diary, Alma wrote a diary and so on, and then somebody put them together into a single set of plates, and then they were translated into English. Based on the "purity of language" hypothesis -- that Joseph Smith translating by the gift and power of God simply found the right English symbols that corresponded to the pure concepts as they were thought in Nephite Language -- the student of faith should find that all the authors of the Book of Mormon are different.

What I'm thinking is this group of apologists posted their most striking result, that Nephi and Alma are two different authors, and then hard stop, hoping the lie would sell. They didn't post any results showing how similar many of the Book of Mormon authors are. My tentative finding is that indeed Alma, Mosiah, and Helaman seem to go together, 2nd Nephi is on its own (due to massive KJV plagiarism), and the rest of the books seem to go together. In other words, while Nephi and pre-Mosiah corpus don't predict Alma, they predict Ether and Moroni very well. The same argument I could use that says Nephi and Alma are different, says that Nephi and Ether and Moroni who all come completely different time periods are the same author.

In other words, the apologists in their secret meetings must have at some point admitted to each other that they will never show that each author within the Book of Mormon has its own unique voice. What they really did, is undertake a line of inquiry that falsified the Book of Mormon. How to save it? One way to save it is exactly what Skousen did. Now that I understand the problem he and the other apologists were up against, I can understand his new line of inquiry. Focus on the translation layer.

The translation layer may provide cover. In my own "research" perhaps the most startling conclusion for me (which should have been obvious for a smarter person) was how well the KJV predicts itself. I expected the KJV to be "noise". We know that Moses isn't the author of the Pentateuch and basically, the Old Testament especially is the work of dozens if not hundreds of different individuals. So really, there shouldn't be any distinct styles with a few exceptions (Paul / Revelation), but yet, apparently, the distinct KJV translation layer is so potent that random chunks of KJV predict other random chunks of KJV was well as Jane Austen predicts Austen, Shakespeare predicts Shakespeare, Hemmingway predicts himself and so on.

So the apologists thinking must have bent towards what they could do with the translation layer instead of the underlying "prophets". The discovery of multiple authors, but the authors don't correlate to the Chapel Mormon version of reality either as distinct prophet voices or Joseph Smith has a seer, essentially points to fraud. How else do you explain one guy wrote Nephi, Ether, and Moroni? Something like the Ghost Committee theory would be virtually forced to be invented to save the Book of Mormon as magical. This is quite interesting to me, because for so long I sat laughing out loud at not just how silly the Ghost theory is -- and yes, it really is silly -- but how unmotivated it was -- why? Why shoot yourselves in the foot with something so ridiculous? But now it's making more sense as to why something like it had to arise.

[Marcus]

Speaking of building on past ideas, I think you're definitely on to something.

I noticed the concluding probability in your link:

...Furthermore, each "rejection" is statistically independent—this means that the chance of two different authors being the product the same person can be determined by multiplying the chance of each individual failure.[5]

...Thus the chance of Nephi and Alma being the same author is found by:

chance of 7 rejections x 8 rejections x 9 rejections x 10 rejections
= 0.005 x 0.001 x 0.0001 x 0.00003
= 0.000000000000015
=1.5 x 10-14...

This 'independence' argument looks familiar, I'll double check my notes, but it sounds exactly like what the Dales' erroneously concluded---results of tests on parts of a single writing are completely independent. Even the conclusion (10 to the negative 14) looks similar.