The artificial intelligence MEGATHREAD

[MG 2.0]

Elementary school.

Even worse given you worked in Utah. Now it's sealed what you knew. I was raised in California amongst the Mexican gang kids and all else. My life was playing four-square, jungle-gym games and kickball. Up to fifth grade I never even thought about a girl and barely knew what adversity was. I moved to Utah, and I had no idea what I was seeing. All the kids were obsessed with sex and knew all the terms (that you know and the teachers there must know). And instead of stuff like, the white-elephant gift party I had in 5th grade, about the last I remember there, the first thing I remember in Utah fifth grade was a school dance where kids are "slow-dancing" and I'm like wtf is this?

And that's because in small conservative towns, everything is about sex because everything is about gender roles and brainwashing kids into young relationships that forces them to grow up and find God. Teen pregnancy is off-the-charts. But it's better that then the kid have an idle thought about metaphysics that puts the norms of their elders into question.

You knew what the term meant, it's not the first crass language you've used on this forum.

Thanks for sharing your personal experience.

Regards,
MG

[Morley]

You knew what the term meant, it's not the first crass language you've used on this forum.

MG didn’t know what those words meant either.

[Marcus]

You knew what the term meant, it's not the first crass language you've used on this forum.

MG didn’t know what those words meant either.

Every time.

[I Have Questions]

He knew what it meant when he used the term. It's not the first time he's resorted to comments like this and then 'pretended' he didn't know what he was saying.

If, as he claims, MG had no idea of the sexual connotation of the term "circle jerk", would you expect him to "guess that many here know what that is and some have participated in it"? Given his already stated opinion of the existence of collaboration amongst certain posters, and their mutually-supporting posts, would he really have to guess, or could he not simply state it as fact?

I could be wrong, but it sounds to me like MG was not totally unaware that there was another meaning of the term, and that his "guess" that "some have participated in it" was intended as a judgement on "some" of us.

Well, the alternative if we take MG’s excuse at face value, is that it is an admission that he writes stuff that he doesn’t understand. Quite the admission either way.

[MG 2.0]

An interesting back and forth over at the Mormon Dialogue Board. Analytics was basically taken to the woodshed when he used an AI product to give ‘his’ reasoning for a naturalistic explanation for the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.

I have to say, I have a bit of empathy for him.

As it is, Smac, Ryan, and some others gave him a run for his money. Kind of hard to get an AI to look at things from EVERY perspective when the system has a record of previous prompts and general demeanor. Naturalistic in, naturalistic out.

By the way, the whole thread is quite enlightening. Plates…again…have been of interest here. Plates along with witnesses, translation, are discussed by some pretty smart people over there.

Much smarter than me. I’m just a regular guy.

Here’s the link:

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/11 ... om/page/1/

Regards

[Rivendale]

An interesting back and forth over at the Mormon Dialogue Board. Analytics was basically taken to the woodshed when he used an AI product to give ‘his’ reasoning for a naturalistic explanation for the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.

I have to say, I have a bit of empathy for him.

As it is, Smac, Ryan, and some others gave him a run for his money. Kind of hard to get an AI to look at things from EVERY perspective when the system has a record of previous prompts and general demeanor. Naturalistic in, naturalistic out.

By the way, the whole thread is quite enlightening. Plates…again…have been of interest here. Plates along with witnesses, translation, are discussed by some pretty smart people over there.

Much smarter than me. I’m just a regular guy.

Here’s the link:

https://www.mormondialogue.org/topic/11 ... om/page/1/

Regards

He wasn't taken to the woodshed. He was performing uncontested slam dunks.

Great. Do you want make a serious examination of the evidence? Let’s look at the witness statements, not as an apologist, but as a jurist.

How would the evidence be evaluated if this were being tried in court? Smac, you're the lawyer here and I'm not, so push back if I get the legal framework wrong. But I think the framework is useful even for a lay audience because the rules of evidence aren't arbitrary technicalities--they evolved over centuries specifically to help us figure out when testimony is trustworthy and when it isn't.

Let's start with the basics. In a legal proceeding, witnesses generally fall into two categories: fact witnesses and expert witnesses. A fact witness testifies about what they personally observed. An expert witness is qualified by training and experience to offer opinions in a specialized domain--metallurgy, ancient languages, archaeology, etc.

So which are the Book of Mormon witnesses? They aren't expert witnesses. None of them had expertise in metallurgy, ancient languages, archaeology, or any other field that would qualify them to authenticate an ancient artifact. They couldn't evaluate whether the plates were gold, tumbaga, or tin. They couldn't read the inscriptions. They couldn't assess whether the artifact was consistent with ancient American metalworking traditions. If a party tried to offer them as expert witnesses in a proceeding, they would be excluded under what are now the Daubert standards--they simply lacked the qualifications to render the opinions being attributed to them.

So they're fact witnesses. Fine. But here is where things get really interesting, because the manner in which this "testimony" was produced violates almost every principle we use to evaluate the reliability of fact testimony.

They were hand-picked. In a legal proceeding, the credibility of testimony is strengthened when witnesses are independent--people who happened to be present and can corroborate what occurred. These witnesses were selected by Joseph Smith himself. They were family members (the Smiths, the Whitmers) and financial stakeholders (Martin Harris, who mortgaged his farm to finance the publication). A judge evaluating this testimony would immediately flag the selection bias. If I'm on trial and I get to choose which 11 people testify on my behalf, and I choose my brothers, my business partners, and my in-laws--how much weight does that testimony carry?

They didn't write their own accounts. The two formal witness statements--the Testimony of the Three Witnesses and the Testimony of the Eight Witnesses--were drafted in consultation with Joseph Smith. The witnesses signed them, but they didn't independently compose them. In legal terms, this is closer to a party drafting testimony for its own witnesses than to independent corroboration. In a deposition, one of the first things opposing counsel establishes is whether the witness wrote their own statement or whether someone else prepared it for them. If someone else prepared it, the testimony is significantly discounted.

There are no contemporaneous independent accounts. We don't have journals, letters, or other contemporaneous documents from the witnesses describing their experiences in their own words at the time they occurred. What we have are the two prepared statements and later recollections, often decades after the fact. Contemporaneous accounts are given far more weight than retroactive ones for good reason--memory is reconstructive, and people unconsciously harmonize their recollections with the narrative they've committed to.

Skeptical witnesses were excluded by design. The entire evidentiary structure was set up so that only believers had access to the evidence. The plates were never subjected to independent examination. No skeptic, no scholar, no expert in any relevant field was permitted to examine them. And then the plates conveniently disappeared. In a courtroom, if one side possessed the single most important piece of physical evidence and refused to let the other side examine it, and then that evidence was destroyed or removed, the judge would issue an adverse inference instruction--telling the jury they may assume the evidence was unfavorable to the party that withheld it. That is how seriously the legal system takes deliberate concealment of evidence.

No cross-examination occurred. This might be the most important point. In our legal system, testimony that hasn't been tested by cross-examination is given very little weight, and for good reason. Cross-examination is how we distinguish between "I saw gold plates with ancient writing" and "I saw an object that Joseph told me was gold plates with ancient writing" and "I saw the plates with my spiritual eyes in a vision" and "I was in a heightened emotional state during a religious ceremony and I experienced something I interpreted as seeing plates." These are very different claims, and a skilled attorney conducting a six-hour deposition of each witness would likely reveal significant variation in what the witnesses actually experienced versus what the prepared statement says they experienced.

We know from later accounts that there was significant variation. Martin Harris reportedly said he saw the plates "with the eye of faith" and "as one sees a city through a mountain." Some of the Eight Witnesses may have handled an object wrapped in cloth without ever seeing the plates directly. A thorough deposition would have explored all of this.

Now, I want to be clear about why I'm raising this. I'm not arguing that the witness testimony should be dismissed on a technicality based on arbitrary rules. The rules of evidence aren't arbitrary--they represent centuries of hard-won wisdom about how testimony becomes unreliable. The point isn't that the testimony violates some procedural checkbox. The point is that the testimony was deliberately structured to be unverifiable. The evidence was managed, the witnesses were selected, the statements were prepared, the physical artifact was withheld from examination, and then it was removed entirely.

This pattern--extraordinary claims supported by carefully managed, unverifiable testimony from hand-picked, financially and emotionally invested witnesses, with the key physical evidence withheld and then destroyed--is not the pattern of authentic historical events. It is the pattern of a magic show. And when I look at the totality of how this evidence was produced, I don't see a reason to give it significant evidentiary weight.

Smac, you have urged me to take the evidence seriously. I am taking it seriously--seriously enough to notice that it was designed from the ground up to resist exactly the kind of scrutiny that would tell us whether it's trustworthy.


Edited March 11 by Analytics

[Gadianton]

I perused the link and have a few observations. The first is we need to separate theories about evidence from theories about Book of Mormon origins. Naturally the two get interwoven, however:

In the other thread, I had noted that Analytics had, in this 2021 discussion, posited, without evidence, that "Sidney Rigdon made the plates out of tin," and/or that "the angel was really an alien doing an anthropology experiment on Joseph Smith," and/or that "the devil conjured up the plates" as all being "more likely" than the explanation given by Joseph Smith, which he (Roger) said is "just not possible." "{A}ny explanation," Roger said, "is more likely than {The Book of Mormon} being an accurate translation of an actual ancient manuscript."

I don't have the context of what Smac is responding to, but I can't see how the existence of the devil would be more likely, I think it would be less likely. I generally take similar points as points about anomalies; there just isn't a way to make a case about the devil being real or the Book of Mormon as a translation of an ancient document.

This was the basis for my challenge/invitation/request to Analytics. I am fine with critics providing alternative theories for the origins of The Book of Mormon, but I think it is, as DCP put it, "intellectually incumbent" upon them to present something more than - as Analytics has - an "anything but that" theory, which is how we end up with a person of Analytics' formidable intellect being reduced to groundless speculation about space aliens and/or Satan.

Anything but that is bad because "anything" includes other supernatural explanations, however, any natural explanation is obviously better. Even natural explanation that has been proven wrong I would argue are still better than the supernatural explanation because at least they could be tested.

Analytics explained believers will never take seriously any supernatural explanation for somebody else's faith the least bit seriously. Essentially what apologists are claiming is their little niche thingy is the first example in the history of the world of an anomalous claim being proven true, or at least being proven more likely than not. Perhaps they will accept other anomalous claims (NDEs) so long as they fit within Mormon doctrine but this would be the only example regarding anomalous texts and mystical objects like gold plates and interpreters. Using the methods the apologists propose, it's amazing they haven't made equally compelling discoveries involving document dating to revolutionize philology or other historiographic methods.

Nobody should take the official account or any other supernatural account seriously. However, that doesn't mean the truth will ever be found. We may simply not have complete enough information to say what happened. DCP and Smac are playing the same game creationists play -- if science can't explain every step in the evolution of every creature, then those steps should be considered the hand of God.

Having said that, naturalistic explanations can still fail to be good explanations. A UFO debunker may really suck at debunking UFOs and display less maturity and equally bad reasoning as those who believe simplistically in UFOs. There could definitely be personal failures involved in the business of debunking. But none of those failures make it a smidgeon more likely that UFOs are aliens. I also think believers must bear the burden of mockery with the dignity their religious texts tell them to. Look, if I ever have an anomalous experience and I'm darn sure I can't explain by psychology or whatever, guess what, I'll take the mockery. I probably won't put much effort into convincing anyone unless I can really come up with something outstanding, which I probably won't be able to do.

[Gadianton]

He wasn't taken to the woodshed. He was performing uncontested slam dunks.

That's about as epic of a takedown of the "witnesses" that I've seen.

[Limnor]

He wasn't taken to the woodshed. He was performing uncontested slam dunks.

That's about as epic of a takedown of the "witnesses" that I've seen.

Agreed.

But in response to Smac, I see three requirements he seeks to be fulfilled:

A) Plates: copper printing plates, consistent with reports of a greenish tint and available material (William Morgan anti-Masonic material).
B) Witnesses: not just observers but participants, with the text itself encoding their roles. When a text specifies “three witnesses” and then later produces exactly three, it’s not automatically evidence of prophecy. It can also be evidence that the outcome was shaped to match the text. Not to mention writing Joseph himself into the story. I think the kids would call that “sus.”
C) Text: a story that tells the circumstances of its own composition.

[Marcus]

He wasn't taken to the woodshed. He was performing uncontested slam dunks.

That's about as epic of a takedown of the "witnesses" that I've seen.

Yes it was. Kudos to Analytics.