265 replies to this topic

[LifeOnaPlate]

Danna, on Dec 22 2008, 04:01 PM, said:

That assumes that Rigdon viewed the production of the BoM as 'fraud'. On the other hand it was a significant accomplishment for him. And he still believed in the principles he embedded in the 'scripture', so why destroy his own work. It appears that the extent of polygamy had been kept from him, so from his point of view, the over-arching goal of restoration was being achieved - in spite of the weaknesses of the official mouthpiece.

After Joseph's death, Rigdon may have been tempted to expose the origin of the book to bring down Brigham, but again, his long-term goal of restoration took priority in the end. He did remain in a pastoral position in a mormon offshoot afterall.

I don't think Oliver would have considered the project a 'fraud' either. Again for him, destroying the work in order to avenge himself on Joseph may not have been an obvious option. He may have considered Joseph a fallen prophet, or acting as a 'man'. But likely the enterprise was larger than just Joseph.

One of the themes that comes out of the Book of Mormon, and the Book of Abraham as well, is that the end justifies the means. This teleological view is seen in the murder of Laban (and its justification), the theft of the brass plates (along with essentially kidnapping Zoram), and God's instruction to Abraham to lie - among other examples. Like the God of the OT, the God of the Book of Mormon will let innocents suffer in order to instruct or correct a people. Working within that teleological framework, fabricating a new scripture and backstory would be perfectly acceptable in order to bring about the restoration.

Check out some of Sidney Rigdon's pre-Mormon writings on Uncle Dale's website. Rigdon was adamant that only the original version of christianity (as defined by him) was acceptable, and restoration of primitive christianity was immense importance to him.

All these arguments (which have their own problems, most of all that they are rather simplistic assertions without much foundation) are thrown to the winds in light of the circumstantial and historical evidence surrounding the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. It really is that simple. But when one begins with the premise (poisoning the well) that Rigdon must have had good reason to lie about the Book of Mormon, especially when the premise is that there ain't no such thing as angels giving books to people, it is easy to dismiss the honest testimony of the participants. Like when Rigdon's daughter described Sidney, who "in the last years of his life called his family together and told them, that as sure as there was a God in heaven, he never had anything to do in getting up the Book of Mormon. And never saw any such thing as a manuscript written by Solomon Spalding."

Edited by LifeOnaPlate, 22 December 2008 - 04:43 PM.

[Cold Steel]

Uncle Dale, on Dec 21 2008, 10:27 AM, said:

Before we say too much, one way or the other, it would be necessary that we compile Rigdon's later writings, transcribe the contents, and sort them out as to their nature and purpose.

His "revelations" seem to reflect his own mindset, namely that everyone between him and the presidency was cast off and rejected of God. I agree that Rigdon would have been far better off to have come clean on any conspiracy to concoct the Book of Mormon.

Certainly with the number of people who supposedly were collaborators on the bookâ??the sheer number it would have taken, I would think that at least one would have come clean. But Cowdery, in poor health, started back for Utah and was rebaptized. He said: "That book is true. Sidney Rigdon did not write it; Mr. Spalding did not write it; I wrote it myself as it fell from the lips of the Prophet. It contains the Everlasting Gospel, and came forth to the children of men in fulfillment of the revelations of John, where he says he saw an angel come with the Everlasting Gospel to preach to every nation, kindred, tongue and people."

He would have been better off where he was, had it all been a fraud. All it takes is one person in a conspiracy to spill the beans, yet with all those spin-offs and vying for power and hard feelings and conflicting opinions, there was nary a leak of fraud. In fact, the most passionate anyone became in the midst of all this was when it was rumored that one of them had abandoned his testimony. It always drew an immediate, direct and heartfelt rebuttal from each and any of the witnesses. In fact, they've always been one of the most forceful evidences of the book in my opinion.

[Gervin]

Cold Steel, on Dec 22 2008, 05:31 PM, said:

All it takes is one person in a conspiracy to spill the beans,

more often than not, all it takes is one person getting caught, then the beans spill. folks don't just go around spilling beans unless it's to their advantage and if you're part of a conspiracy you better be damn sure you're going to come out on the other side smelling like a rose ..

[Danna]

LifeOnaPlate, on Dec 22 2008, 04:39 PM, said:

All these arguments (which have their own problems, most of all that they are rather simplistic assertions without much foundation) are thrown to the winds in light of the circumstantial and historical evidence surrounding the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. It really is that simple. But when one begins with the premise (poisoning the well) that Rigdon must have had good reason to lie about the Book of Mormon, especially when the premise is that there ain't no such thing as angels giving books to people, it is easy to dismiss the honest testimony of the participants. Like when Rigdon's daughter described Sidney, who "in the last years of his life called his family together and told them, that as sure as there was a God in heaven, he never had anything to do in getting up the Book of Mormon. And never saw any such thing as a manuscript written by Solomon Spalding."

Yes, of course I am speculating - in response to claims along the lines of "if Rigdon really wrote the Book of Mormon he would have ... (insert act of revenge exposing conspiracy to write BoM) ... in response to ...(some offense during his long and varied career)...

[Benjamin McGuire]

Just another comment on this study. From the website, they provided a chart showing the groupings from all the texts which they compared (the vocabularies that is) to the Book of Mormon. The closest match was the Isaiah and Malachi material. The next closest authors were Longfellow and Barlow. because of this closeness, we would expect (if the authors were entirely unrelated) that in general Isaiah/Malachi would be preferred most of the time to Longfellow and Barlow (since the Longfellow and Barlow samples are not quite as close to the Book of Mormon samples as the Isaiah/Malachi samples). Had we taken the the Isaiah/Malachi author out of the study (which was never done), most of the Isaiah/Malachi samples would not have become Cowdry or Rigdon or Spaulding samples - they would have become Longfellow and Barlow identifications. This suggests that the low Longfellow and Barlow comparisons are in fact contrived.

The studies basis for determining error rates seems to be a bit biased. If we get rid of the glib explanation for why the Isaiah/Malachi results don't really mean anything, the error rate in the study is much higher than the error rate they obtained against known authors.

In the original context (cancer studies), this statistical model was built to attempt to get accurate identifications using a small set of samples - when applied across all several thousand genes, cancer types could be determined with one hundred percent accuracy already (using other models). The question was whether or not we could reduce the necessary sampling pool to 100 or even fewer genes to accurately determine the cancer type with the same accuracy. And it was discovered that it was possible - but the model determined the genes which needed to be evaluated.

In this case, the genes (the vocabulary words) are chosen through a completely different (and seemingly subjective) process, and so there doesn't seem to me to be the same kind of process involved. The method in the study boils down to the most common shared words (which could actually be replaced by taking the 100 most used words of the time period - to the same essential effect). However this does not seem (intuitively at least) to be able to say a lot about a particular author's choice of vocabulary and its unique features.

Ben McGuire

[wenglund]

NorthboundZax, on Dec 22 2008, 01:22 PM, said:

This has been answered both here and on MDB, including the section you just quoted. I realize that I have a tendency to write somewhat opaquely, but Danna's post #227 among others addresses exactly this issue. To try to clarify, though, in this kind of measure, with no reason to believe that any particular author has a statistically similar voice to the actual author, no author would be way out in front of the others, just small differences in the probabilities (like in Danna's example).

What reason is there to suppose that a particular author or authors don't have statistically similar voices to the actual author? In fact, doesn't the "small differences in probability" you mention above suggest that there may be statistical similarities in the voices already included in the study?

Quote

For a voice to register as a strong false positive, that voice must have a statistically similar voice (note that weak first place authors shouldn't really be considered as false positive as they should be discounted as deriving from chance, but for good or bad people are using the terminology as if they are).  What this means is that a 'strikingly' similar voice would register as a significant probability even in the presence of the actual author.

This explains what may be expected to happen when there is a "statistically similar voice" in the presense of the actual author.

However, it doesn't answer my question whether the wordprint techniques can determine if a "significant probability" represents a "statistically similar voice" or the voice of the actual author--and this absent capreciously assuming there is no statistically similar voice, and absent knowing whether the actual author has been included in the study or not?

For example, let's assume that author "A" has a statistically similar voice to author "G" (the actual author of the text in question), whereas authors "B" through "D"  aren't as statistically similar, and authors "E" and "F" are used as controls and are statistically dissimilar in voice to author "B". And, let's say that all the authors but "G" are included in the study.

If I understand the wordprint techniques correctly, the results of this hypothetical study would suggest that there is a significant probability that author "A" is the author of the text in question. The wrong author, then, would be given attribution. Right?

What are the chances of this happening with the Stanford study? Who knows? But, if the actual author9s) is/are not included in the study, then there may be as much as 100% chance of a false positive depending upon how statistically similar the voices included in the study are to the actual author(s).

In other words, while the wordprint techniques may rule out study results where there is a "weak firstplace author", they can't, in cases where there is a "strong firstplace author", tell us whether the actual author has been included in the study or not, or whether the results of the study are a false positive or not (i.e. whether the study attributes a high probability to the wrong author).

Thanks, -Wade Englund-