Making a fair and thorough literary evaluation of Book of Mormon authorship

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ParkerD said:
No–they picked the two “controls” because there were words common to both works, and because they thought the two epic poems contained a “similar subject”. If the “word prints” had been “very close”, then that would have nullified their “study” because the controls would not have shown distinctiveness from their other samples.

So, the common words were the lists I provided. Those words are probably the most common words in the English language, except that they left out words like “God” and “Lord” because that would have not led to the conclusion they wanted to reach.

They’re saying because the number of word counts is similar from their list of words, the most closely matched word count author is most likely the same author as the author of the Book of Mormon. ???

Another anomaly from their “control” is that Song of Hiawatha was written after 1850.
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To the general reader:

The final section of this thread is dealing with a “study” by three teachers at Stanford University who used word counts to make comparisons about potential authorship of the Book of Mormon. Their “controls” were “Columbiad”, an epic poem that was a revised and enlarged version by Joel Barlow of his earlier work about Columbus he had published in 1787, and “Song of Hiawatha” published by Longfellow in 1855.

Both of those “controls” were epic poems (not the same or even remotely the same genre), and both were written primarily in third person epic narrative about the main characters, although Columbiad has a sort of first person “muse”.

The list of words used in the word count are shown in an earlier post a reader can find on this same page of the thread. A reader will be able to note that the word “I” is on the list.

For anyone to think that a third person narrative is going to have a similar amount of use of the word “I” as an often first-person, often-didactic narrative such as the Book of Mormon, is a pretty big stretch for their “control” to fit the description of being a scientific “control”.

What English teacher will say that a third-person epic poem narrative and a first-person autobiographical/didactic narrative are likely to have the same amount of use of the word “I”? (I hope not many, if any.)
 
to the general reader:

Parker’s Tap Dancing aside, it has been proven nicely that the Book of Mormon is a fraud. The chart by LJ is pretty compelling, as are other studies, affidavits from Spaulding family and friends that have never been refuted, and common sense (lack of any scientific or archeological supporting evidence).
 
ParkerD said:
???

The “statistics” used is counting the number of occurrences of one of the words from the word list they selected. They let a computer do the counting, thus needing to use a text that was loaded into a database so that they could do that.
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ParkerD, have you taken any college level statistical courses? Statistics is scientific, mathematical and logical. Counting is where the statistical analysis begins, but counting is not statistics.

This gives me the idea that you are making it up as you go along.
 
LongJourney said:
to the general reader:

Parker is talking to himself.
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He addressed the ‘general reader.’ However, since you read it, obviously, and so did I, perhaps we should put ourselves in the category 'special," rather than 'general?"

As for me, his objections are absolutely correct. As an English teacher…and as a linguist of sorts, familiar with precisely this sort of (we call it 'lemon squeezing") analysis, the use of the word list was an instant, and huge, red flag.

Those words are the nuts, bolts and basis of the langauge; the bricks with which the language is built, and without which NO English sentence will make sense.

Using THAT word list, one could “prove” that MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was cribbed from *The Castle of Otranto. *
 
dianaiad said:
He addressed the ‘general reader.’ However, since you read it, obviously, and so did I, perhaps we should put ourselves in the category 'special," rather than 'general?"

As for me, his objections are absolutely correct. As an English teacher…and as a linguist of sorts, familiar with precisely this sort of (we call it 'lemon squeezing") analysis, the use of the word list was an instant, and huge, red flag.

Those words are the nuts, bolts and basis of the langauge; the bricks with which the language is built, and without which NO English sentence will make sense.

Using THAT word list, one could “prove” that MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech was cribbed from *The Castle of Otranto. *
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Do you think you are fooling anyone?

As a guy with a minor in English, an ex-teacher, a former junior college prof, and an attorney, what Perker says is grasping for straws. The fol,ks who did the study have mopre experience than Diana and Parker combined. The study was a good study. Diana would not be so adamant if it did not destroy the fictional book she was fooled into believing.
 
ParkerD, the word list you copied and pasted is from the appendix, sited as the " NSC Classification" used.

Perhaps you’d like to read this portion and get back to me with your refutation on the use of ‘nearest shrunken centroids’ in the study, and how statistically it is being used in an invalid manner.
The first technique, ‘delta’ (Burrows, 2002, 2003; Hoover, 2004a,b) is well-documented in the literature of computational linguistics, so we omit a detailed description here. The second is ‘nearest shrunken centroids’ (NSC). NSC is a statistical technique for classification in high-dimensional settings. The problem of authorship attribution is a classification problem because we seek to classify a text sample of unknown authorship into one of a fixed number of known author categories – in this case a closed set of candidate authors: Rigdon, Spalding, Cowdery, Longfellow, etc. The problem is high-dimensional because we seek to perform classification on the basis of a very large number of words. The method is as follows. First, we compute average word frequency vectors, or centroids, for each known author, on the basis of the text samples of known authorship. Next, we shrink these centroids towards the overall average word frequency vector across all of the authors, in order to make our method more robust to small changes in word frequencies. Finally, we classify a text of unknown authorship by computing its word frequency vector and determining to which of the shrunken centroids it is most similar. NSC was initially intended for a completely different purpose: it was developed to assist cancer diagnosis by classifying patient tumor samples into cancer subtypes based on gene expression measurements. However, from a machine learning perspective, the problem of authorship attribution is surprisingly similar to that of cancer diagnosis: rather than classifying tumors by cancer subtype, we classify texts by author, and instead of using gene expression measurements to perform the classification, we use word frequencies. [22] This creates the seven author categories described above. The same kind of analysis is then done on a Book of Mormon chapter, and the resulting pattern is compared to the pattern of each of the seven potential author categories (Rigdon – 90%; Longfellow – 1%; etc.) On this basis, NSC assigns a probability that each potential author wrote each Book of Mormon chapter; just as it would assign a probability that a tissue sample manifests a particular cancer sub-type. More details regarding NSC can be found in Tibshirani (2002, 2003). [23]
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RebeccaJ said:
ParkerD, the word list you copied and pasted is from the appendix, sited as the " NSC Classification" used.

Perhaps you’d like to read this portion and get back to me with your refutation on the use of ‘nearest shrunken centroids’ in the study, and how statistically it is being used in an invalid manner.
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RebeccaJ,
The words “nearest shrunken centroids” may have confused you. Here is the description of the use of the 110 words that became the basic focus of the study:

"(1) We selected the words that occurred at least once in the samples from each author and also at least once in the Book of Mormon. This resulted in a set of 521 words.

(2) We selected the subset of these 521 words that have a mean relative frequency, across the 456 samples, of at least 0.1%. This resulted in a set of 114 words.

(3) We removed the words ‘god,’ ‘ye,’ ‘thy,’ and ‘behold,’ as these occurred at much higher frequencies in texts relating to biblical subject matter.

The resulting list of 110 words is available in Appendix B. [31] "

If you read about the entire methodology that Jockers follows (available to read about through links from his website), he builds statistical models to analyze authors’ use of words in his research of literature.
 
RebeccaJ said:
ParkerD, the word list you copied and pasted is from the appendix, sited as the " NSC Classification" used.

Perhaps you’d like to read this portion and get back to me with your refutation on the use of ‘nearest shrunken centroids’ in the study, and how statistically it is being used in an invalid manner.
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RebeccaJ,
Here is another explanation from the study, of the use of the word list that formed the entire basis of the statistical analysis that supposedly suggests a certain author (from the tiny list of possible authors they chose to include in their study) because of their frequency of use of the words from the word list:

"Cross-validation allowed us to estimate the error that we would obtain if we tried to classify the samples of known authorship using NSC and delta. The above process was repeated multiple times, and the average misclassification error rate recorded. The lowest delta error rate of 11.1% was obtained using ninety words. This means that if we used delta to classify a new sample written by one of the seven known authors, then the probability of correct classification would be 88.9%. The lowest NSC error rate was obtained when all 110 words were included; the error rate was 8.8%. This means that we would expect to classify correctly a new sample written by one of the seven candidate authors 91.2% of the time. Since there are seven candidate authors, a classifier that selected an author completely at random would give a correct classification rate of 1/7 or 14.3%, and an average misclassification error rate of 6/7, or 85.7%. Therefore, the low error rates obtained using NSC and delta are impressive. The fact that NSC results in lower error rates indicates that this method is appropriate for authorship attribution, and may in this case be superior to delta.

Using delta, five of the 239 chapters of the Book of Mormon were incorrectly assigned to control author Longfellow (none to Barlow), an error rate of 2.1%. Using NSC, only two chapters were assigned incorrectly to Longfellow (none to Barlow), an error rate of 0.8%. To provide best estimates of individual chapter authorship for the five authors who are linked historically to the Book of Mormon (Spalding, Rigdon, Cowdery, and Pratt) or who are known to have contributed (Isaiah-Malachi), we also performed a second delta and NSC analysis (hereafter referred to as the ‘five-author case’) in which we omitted the Barlow and Longfellow control texts. In the five-author case, the lowest NSC error rate was obtained using 108 words (listed in Appendix B)."

5 Results

For each chapter of the Book of Mormon, using both NSC and delta, we compared the relative probability that a candidate author or a control author contributed to that chapter. We then established a ‘ranking’ for each of the seven authors (1-7) from most likely to least likely and calculated the percentage point difference between candidates in terms of their probability."
 
ParkerD said:
RebeccaJ,
The words “nearest shrunken centroids” may have confused you. Here is the description of the use of the 110 words that became the basic focus of the study:

"(1) We selected the words that occurred at least once in the samples from each author and also at least once in the Book of Mormon. This resulted in a set of 521 words.

(2) We selected the subset of these 521 words that have a mean relative frequency, across the 456 samples, of at least 0.1%. This resulted in a set of 114 words.

(3) We removed the words ‘god,’ ‘ye,’ ‘thy,’ and ‘behold,’ as these occurred at much higher frequencies in texts relating to biblical subject matter.

The resulting list of 110 words is available in Appendix B. [31] "

If you read about the entire methodology that Jockers follows (available to read about through links from his website), he builds statistical models to analyze authors’ use of words in his research of literature.
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your tap dancing changes nothing
 
RebeccaJ said:
No doubt. But no, it’s the little miss (me) who is confused. lol. Maybe he thinks saying I don’t know statistics well enough means I don’t know statistics at all.
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RebeccaJ,
I have no idea whether you know statistics. I think the authors of the study described a simple procedure with simple results. Based on their results, their study if completely objective and impartial would say that Longfellow “wrote” some of the chapters of the Book of Mormon.

I wish they had added in the works of Emerson and Thoreau. I would assume that Emerson and Thoreau would have a more similar use of the word “I” than Longfellow, and if running their findings using those two more “control” authors it would have been interesting to see if their results came up with either of them as a “most close in word use” (but only focusing on their list of common words) author.
(I tend to suspect so, since the personal essay genre is at least closer to the Book of Mormon as a genre than an epic poetry genre.)

To the general reader:

Thanks for having spent the time puzzling over this thread, and best wishes to each of you with great peace in your life.
 
It’s funny how you called this thread a ‘fair and thorough literary evaluation of the BOM’ when it’s anything but.

Since the last thread we were discussing this on was unceremoniously closed for no reason, I’ll respond here.

You said: "RH,
I wasn’t parroting any other source. The words I wrote came from my own mind. I am very much aware of stylistic differences among authors as I read the Book of Mormon. So are my children as we read it together. It is not hard to see for an English student who understands stylistics in writing.

“As to what Luke quoted from the Savior’s teachings, evidently you think that Luke came up with that passage from his own mind, but of course he didn’t. He came up with that teaching directly from what he knew of the Savior’s teaching and use of that prophecy from Moses. Luke wasn’t presenting new doctrine. He was presenting what he knew of the Savior’s doctrine, and was recounting the teachings as he wrote the book of Luke and the book of Acts.”

First, I didn’t say you plagiarized anyone, only that you were parroting someone else’s position. You imply that you’re ‘an English student who understands stylistics in writing,’ but you didn’t go very far in refuting what I presented. Surely, being so much more advanced in the study of languages than the rest of us here, you should’ve easily been able to dismiss the major problems of 3 Nephi 20:23-23, but instead, you tried to sneak past the issue with three sentences, none of which went anywhere.

Second, you’re trying to de-emphasize the mistake the Joseph Smith made when he wrote the BOM: “Behold, I am he of whom Moses spake, saying: A prophet shall the Lord your God raise up unto you of your brethren, like unto me; him shall ye hear in all things whatsoever he shall say unto you. And it shall come to pass that every soul who will not hear that prophet shall be cut off from among the people.”

These two sentences (in red) are word-for-word identical to those that we find in Acts 3:22-23. No, he didn’t ‘come up with that teaching directly from what he knew of the Savior’s teaching and use of that prophecy from Moses’ because that doesn’t make sense. He’d be using his own words to describe what Jesus said, but, if the BOM is what it claims to be, we have Jesus speaking to different groups of people at different times but using the same exact words. Not impossible for God, but in the Bible, we find that the proper context is used, the words being noted as basically what Moses had said, but in the BOM we find the incorrect context being used because the Mormon jesus is using Luke’s words and attributing them to Moses, leaving Luke out of the equation altogether.

That’s neither fair nor impartial; it’s intellectually dishonest of you to simply try to sweep this one under the rug. Your claim here doesn’t make sense but it’s the only way you can wiggle out of it. Do you ever get tired of being confused by Mormonism, having to make claims that get farther and farther out of the realm of possibility as you go?

The issue of jesus’ mistake in 3 Nephi 20:23-25 notwithstanding, it also makes no sense that Luke would choose identical words as did Nephi some 700 years earlier, complete with the Elizabethan English *ye *when he knew nothing of the Jews who managed to get to America.

If you and I go to see a movie and then write a review of it on our respective blogs, odds are that the sentence structure and content are going to bear no resemblence to each other. You’ll claim otherwise, of course, but if you’re right, we should see evidence for this over and over again.

And since we know that the BOM is either a literal word-for-word or character-for-character translation of the fictional plates, we know that Smith wasn’t using his own words as he dictated. It therefore also makes no sense that Smith, when translating from Deformed Egyptian, came up with the same words that translators working from the Hebrew texts published in the KJV over and over again.

We find this problem again in the Book of Abraham, since large swaths of the Book of Abraham and Book of Moses are simply Genesis rearranged and put into different order. In some cases, however, Smith was arrogant enough to put them in the same order, verse after verse, not thinking that anyone would catch on.
 
Regarding the use of *kindreds, and tongues, and nations *in the BOM, you claim: “Here are the verses you presented, and as I get time I’ll explain about how an angel teaching John and a vision that John has can present the gospel message in the same language and with the same message as an angel teaching other prophets or as a vision another prophet has.”

We must address ‘angel,’ too, because we know that Moroni is referred to as an angel time and again, but we find no evidence of people becoming angels in either the Bible or the BOM. And if Moroni did truly become an angel when he died, I’m betting he wasn’t very happy because he was cheated out of exaltation. All that work for nothing.

You took the time to type out the verses, but all you managed to do was show how the BOM mimics the Bible over and over which could be accomplished by someone who was familiar with the Bible, as we know that Joseph Smith was.

“I don’t know why you don’t think the angels are aware of all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, but I think they are aware of them and can communicate about messages that impact all people, using that specific language. Often it happens in the Bible that several words having a similar meaning are used in succession, to emphasize the point being made. Of course an angel could visit Lehi and use the same kind of language as an angel was later going to use when he visited John. This is totally to be expected.”

You make a convicing argument and I’m sure some have fallen for it, but the fact is that we have, time and again, the BOM text using Elizabethan English, which they couldn’t possibly have been exposed to.

Yes, you typed out some of the verses, but you forgot to mention that the way they appear in the BOM is almost chronologically the way each appears in the Bible. It looks to be that the author of the BOM simply went through the Bible and chose what he liked, going in order that they appear in the KJV (which we know Smith owned).

“The angel who visited Nephi told him that John was going to have a similar vision and that John would have the responsibility to write further things from the vision than the things that Nephi was told to write. So of course the angel would use similar language, and of course the knowledge that Jesus provides the blessing of the atonement and through that blessing our “garments are made white in the blood of the Lamb” is known by the angels.”

This is much less impressive in light of the fact that if you look at it from the opposite direction, the BOM could’ve easily been fabricated around the Bible instead of predicting what would happen therein. Since the BOM appears to be repeatedly plagiarized from the New Testament, which had yet to be written, the implications become increasingly obvious when introducing the fact that the BOM has not one piece of evidence to support it, that it advances almost nothing new when compared to the Bible, and that Smith, being on par with the Biblical prophets of old, had a perfect 0% accuracy rating for his entire career.
 
Returning_Home said:
  1. We must address ‘angel,’ too, because we know that Moroni is referred to as an angel time and again, but we find no evidence of people becoming angels in either the Bible or the BOM. And if Moroni did truly become an angel when he died, I’m betting he wasn’t very happy because he was cheated out of exaltation. All that work for nothing.
  2. it advances almost nothing new when compared to the Bible.
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RH,
I suppose you are aware that during the visions that John had that he recorded as the book of Revelation, he saw several angels, and some of them conversed with him at various times. One of those conversations happens in Revelation 19:10, wherein the angel with whom John is conversing responds to John’s expressed desire to “worship” the angel. The verse says John “fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy.”

You may have some belief about the words “fellowservant” and “thy brethren” than I have, but I think it makes simple and complete sense that those words mean that angel was saying he had previously lived his life on the earth and was at that particular moment giving a message to John by assignment from Christ.

The word “angel” usually means “messenger from God” as far as how that word is usually used in the Bible, unless specifically used with the word “fallen” as a modifier which then refers to either Satan or his rebellious followers. But there are instances when the word “angel” has other meanings, such as the one you evidently are referring to when the Savior told the Sadducees that their hypothetical brother Sadducees would be “as the angels”, meaning “not as sons of God”. The context of the word is what helps one figure out its specific meaning in the passage where it is used.

Moroni acted as a “messenger from God”, which does not mean he was not resurrected to be a “son of God” as Christ promised about those who fully comply with gospel covenant-making and keeping. It means he was sent to the earth with a message from Christ about the gospel of Jesus Christ. He fulfilled Revelation 14:6 with giving the world the message he delivered.
  1. I don’t know how far you stretch the word “almost”, but if you really think that, then go ahead and write up a complete description of a “tree of life vision” using the Bible, and go ahead and write up a complete “tame and wild olive tree” allegory using the Bible, and go ahead and write up how the Bible presents the teaching that there must be “opposition in all things” and also as thorough a teaching about the atonement of Christ as the Book of Mormon provides to the world.
 
Returning_Home said:
Since the last thread we were discussing this on was unceremoniously closed for no reason, I’ll respond here.
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RH,
I didn’t close the earlier thread. I don’t have the wherewithal to do that, nor am I policing threads.

I’m going to be “intellectually honest” here. I feel no need to respond to this post. Your post here has reminded me that I need not feel any obligation to respond to someone with the built-in negativity already in their presentation. If you want more fuel for the fire of that negativity, then look for it somewhere else (or you may look for it right here when I don’t answer what I’ve already answered and you evidently didn’t understand).

If you care to present your questions with at least some sense of a respectful way, then I’ll consider answering the questions.
 
ParkerD said:
RH,
I didn’t close the earlier thread. I don’t have the wherewithal to do that, nor am I policing threads.

I’m going to be “intellectually honest” here. I feel no need to respond to this post. Your post here has reminded me that I need not feel any obligation to respond to someone with the built-in negativity already in their presentation. If you want more fuel for the fire of that negativity, then look for it somewhere else (or you may look for it right here when I don’t answer what I’ve already answered and you evidently didn’t understand).

If you care to present your questions with at least some sense of a respectful way, then I’ll consider answering the questions.
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Just because he proves you wrong does not mean it is disrespectful. And don;t make excuses for not being able to respond to him

Good work, RH
 
ParkerD said:
RebeccaJ,
I have no idea whether you know statistics.
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Well, it is at an undergrad level.
I think the authors of the study described a simple procedure with simple results. Based on their results, their study if completely objective and impartial would say that Longfellow “wrote” some of the chapters of the Book of Mormon.
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I wish they had added in the works of Emerson and Thoreau. I would assume that Emerson and Thoreau would have a more similar use of the word “I” than Longfellow, and if running their findings using those two more “control” authors it would have been interesting to see if their results came up with either of them as a “most close in word use” (but only focusing on their list of common words) author.
(I tend to suspect so, since the personal essay genre is at least closer to the Book of Mormon as a genre than an epic poetry genre.)
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Which has nothing to do with your claim that they used an invalid statistical method. Still waiting for you to produce the evidence for this.

If their control selection is off, explain the statistical reasoning why, not just your “suspicions”.
 
To the general reader:

Since RebeccaJ has asked some questions I intend to answer, but others may read here and may not be familiar with the conversation going on, at minimum it will be important for an unfamiliar reader to be aware of the website that presents the study by three authors who teach at Stanford University that is the subject of the current conversation:

The authors wrote:
“For control purposes, we selected two texts: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s (1855) Song of Hiawatha and Joel Barlow’s Columbiad (1825). Barlow and Longfellow were initially selected as control authors because both are roughly contemporary to the Book of Mormon, both deal to an extent with concepts found in the Book of Mormon, and both employ formulaic patterns consistent with patterns of verse seen in the Book of Mormon. [27] To further test the appropriateness of these control texts, we performed a series of simple hierarchical classification tests using frequently occurring non-contextual words and fifty novels of the same era (1789-1850). [28] The texts written by Longfellow and Barlow consistently clustered close to the Book of Mormon indicating that they were appropriate choices for use as control texts. (“Reassessing authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification”)”

Here is the link to abstracts from the study:

solomonspalding.com/Lib/Jock2008.htm#pg465a
 
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