Gadianton wrote: ↑Sat Jun 26, 2021 7:48 pm
Yeah, Brant went to town and made some good points.
They say a sucker is born every minute, and I guess it was my turn to be born. It's been pointed out to me in private, to save from the embarrassment, that this is an old article.
It was
linked to over at SeN on the latest 'post' and in my haste to get to past the rubbish and get to the comments, I was left looking at the description of this article while at the same time reading the first comment, which was by Sledge.
I should know better at this point to check first.
you're no sucker! it's not like full information is given; various members of the SeN crowd are back to bragging that something is "newly" published every Friday by the Journal in question. Who knew that "newly published" meant "already published once before and re-published now so we can keep pretending no Fridays have been missed"? It must be one of those loan-shifted words.
Seriously, though, considering Carmack's work, your thread reminded me of a couple of statistical quibbles I would like to make regarding his assertion that the Book of Mormon looks nothing like other pseudo-biblical works published in that era. First of all, note that there he only analyzes 4 other works before making his conclusion, so not only just five in total, but five which were written across a fifty-six year span, and are of very different lengths. The four works being compared to the Book of Mormon range from 14,500-49,300 words. That's an incredibly small sample, both in number and word count, to compare against the Book of Mormon at 275,000 words. Even though he uses percentages, that is insufficient to normalize across length
Next, what his research actually shows is whether the 1830 B ofM is written like the AVERAGE of those four extremely shorter pseudo-biblical works which were written between 1774 and 1816. That's not sufficient to establish whether it fits into the same category of those works, in my opinion, but of course I am looking only at the statistics.
For example, in a single tiny category, Carmack finds that the Book of Mormon doesn't look like the AVERAGE of the other four works, because it is twice as likely as the average to include pseudo-biblical terms in that category. When he repeats the analysis for a different tiny category, he again finds that the Book of Mormon doesn't look like the AVERAGE of the other four works, but this time its because it is far less likely to include the terms in question. And so on, and so on. Again, just properly normalizing for length would undo most of these, but more importantly, they don't agree with each other on why the Book of Mormon is 'different.' Is it more pseudo-biblical? Less pseudo-biblical? Not related at all? The answer is different for every little analysis.
In other words, every analysis is independent and simply shows the difference from the AVERAGE of the other four, but in different ways and at different strengths every time. I guarantee that I could come up with similar results for any one of the four pseudo-biblical works, if I put the Book of Mormon together with the three works left, and then compared that fourth one to the new AVERAGE. Length differences would continue to exacerbate the errors in comparison, rendering the analysis mostly meaningless.
The saying is true: there are lies, damn lies, and then there are [mis-used and mis-represented] statistics. Enthusiasm doesn't make up for solid peer analysis.
Gadianton wrote: ↑Sat Jun 26, 2021 5:43 pm
Okay, I heard this joke the other day.
How do you find out what's in volumes 2-7 of "A reasonable leap into the light" without buying the books or obtaining illegal copies?
my extremely rude guess would be to say: read the works they will be plagiarized from?
2nd try: I confess I am apologetically impaired due to my years of not paying attention. Please tell me the rest of the joke.