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Jockers et al


canterdogs

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Stanford academics Jockers, Witten and Criddle recently published a peer review article in Literary & Linguistic Computing on the authorship of the Book of Mormon. The title of the article is "Reassing the authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification". It was published in 2009. The article finds statistical evidence to support the Spalding-Rigdon theory of the Book of Mormon authorship. The abstract reads as follows:

Mormon prophet Joseph Smith (1805

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This reminds me of what they call in Australian Parliment a "Dorethy Dix " question where the Minister asks a member of his party's backbench to ask him this "question without notice" so he can spend the time first of all promoting something he wants and bagging the opposition members on the other side. We all know by now that Bruce S has a paper being published in the same journal.

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This reminds me of what they call in Australian Parliment a "Dorethy Dix " question where the Minister asks a member of his party's backbench to ask him this "question without notice" so he can spend the time first of all promoting something he wants and bagging the opposition members on the other side. We all know by now that Bruce S has a paper being published in the same journal.

Please cite the paper by Bruce S in that same journal. Thanks.

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Stanford academics Jockers, Witten and Criddle recently published a peer review article in Literary & Linguistic Computing on the authorship of the Book of Mormon. The title of the article is "Reassing the authorship of the Book of Mormon using delta and nearest shrunken centroid classification".

Re what????

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A great response is pending publication as we speak. In the meantime, check out my weak initial reply, which pointed out a significant issue with the original study.

http://www.lifeongol...t-analysis.html

The fact that Joseph Smith was not included in the author study has been addressed by Craig Criddle in a presentation that can be found on Youtube. He stated that they genuinely could not find any material that could be definitely attributed to Joseph Smith at the time of their study. To me this adds weight to their argument and actually corroborates testimonies of people like Emma Smith who have stated that Joseph Smith could hardly put a sentence together. Further, and most importantly, their study sheds light on an existing theory. It tests the theory using data. As Criddle stated in his presentation, the evidence might have come out differently and the Spalding Rigdon theory might have been refuted. But they did find evidence in support of this theory.

btw, in Criddle's presentation, they have updated their results to include samples of JS writings. Their original results still stand.

I'll be waiting for a published response to this paper.

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Craig Criddle addresses these points in his presentation at the Ex-Mormon Foundation. Youtube Craig Criddle and you can see his presentation. He finds evidence for Spalding, Rigdon, Cowdery as well as Isaiah and Malachi. In other words, he finds evidence for multiple authors.

You will have to provide a link, sorry.

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part 1 is here

you should be able to follow from here on.

I have looked at it - but found that it fails to connect Spalding with Joseph, and connecting Spalding with Rigdon won't due, since the Book of Mormon was already published by the time Rigdon met Joseph.

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The fact that Joseph Smith was not included in the author study has been addressed by Craig Criddle in a presentation that can be found on Youtube. He stated that they genuinely could not find any material that could be definitely attributed to Joseph Smith at the time of their study. To me this adds weight to their argument and actually corroborates testimonies of people like Emma Smith who have stated that Joseph Smith could hardly put a sentence together. Further, and most importantly, their study sheds light on an existing theory. It tests the theory using data. As Criddle stated in his presentation, the evidence might have come out differently and the Spalding Rigdon theory might have been refuted. But they did find evidence in support of this theory.

btw, in Criddle's presentation, they have updated their results to include samples of JS writings. Their original results still stand.

I'll be waiting for a published response to this paper.

I'm fully aware. The only difficulty is that not "being able to find" any material etc. just throws the whole project into the dustbin of utter speculation.

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Craig Criddle addresses these points in his presentation at the Ex-Mormon Foundation. Youtube Craig Criddle and you can see his presentation. He finds evidence for Spalding, Rigdon, Cowdery as well as Isaiah and Malachi. In other words, he finds evidence for multiple authors.

Craig does not address the problem that will arise if none of the candidates are the actual author(s) of a given text. If actual author is not included in a candidate set, the results will be skewed and invalid. The NSC method using relative probabilities will always pick a "winner" even if the actual author is not tested. Using the Jockers methodology and positing Spalding, Cowdery, Pratt, Joseph Smith, and Rigdon on the 51 Federalist papers known to be authored by Hamilton but not including Hamilton will produce results even more remarkable than the Spalding/Rigdon et al Book of Mormon test. Would you believe that Sidney Rigdon would be picked as the probable author for 28 of those texts? But when Hamilton is added to the mix, he is correctly picked as the author every time. The NSC study he is referring to did not implement any controls testing the hypothesis that the actual author is not included. That has been a major point of criticism of the study.

This has been pointed out several times, but it seems no one is paying attention.

That will come soon though.

Glenn

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Craig does not address the problem that will arise if none of the candidates are the actual author(s) of a given text. If actual author is not included in a candidate set, the results will be skewed and invalid. The NSC method using relative probabilities will always pick a "winner" even if the actual author is not tested. Using the Jockers methodology and positing Spalding, Cowdery, Pratt, Joseph Smith, and Rigdon on the 51 Federalist papers known to be authored by Hamilton but not including Hamilton will produce results even more remarkable than the Spalding/Rigdon et al Book of Mormon test. Would you believe that Sidney Rigdon would be picked as the probable author for 28 of those texts? But when Hamilton is added to the mix, he is correctly picked as the author every time. The NSC study he is referring to did not implement any controls testing the hypothesis that the actual author is not included. That has been a major point of criticism of the study.

This has been pointed out several times, but it seems no one is paying attention.

That will come soon though.

Glenn

Statistical analysis like the one performed by Jockers et al is always informed by a theory. While including Rigdon in a NSC study of the Federalist paper may yield significant results, it is a spurious study because we know that he did not write them. But there is an existing theory linking Spalding and Rigdon to the Book of Mormon. So testing these individuals is plausible. We can, therefore, use statistics to see if there is any validity to these claims. It turns out that there is validity to these claims.

In economics we have the same problem. Econometric studies are meaningless if there isn't a theory or hypothesis informing us of what we should expect. Likewise, the Jockers study starts with a theory and tests it using statistics.

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Statistical analysis like the one performed by Jockers et al is always informed by a theory. While including Rigdon in a NSC study of the Federalist paper may yield significant results, it is a spurious study because we know that he did not write them. But there is an existing theory linking Spalding and Rigdon to the Book of Mormon. So testing these individuals is plausible. We can, therefore, use statistics to see if there is any validity to these claims. It turns out that there is validity to these claims.

In economics we have the same problem. Econometric studies are meaningless if there isn't a theory or hypothesis informing us of what we should expect. Likewise, the Jockers study starts with a theory and tests it using statistics.

It is not spurious. Bruce came up with a theory that not having the correct author included in an authorship study would skew and produce invalid results. He tested this theory by excluding Hamilton from the list even though we know that Hamilton was the author. The results are invalid because we know that Hamilton is the author.

But the NSC method Jockers used will produce winners even if the true author is not included, as it did with Rigdon et al with the Federalist papers. If the true author is not included in the Book of Mormon authorship studies, the results are invalid. Even thoug a "winner" is picked every time, the actual correlation is so far away from the actual texts as to be statistically insignificant.

There have been several threads here on this forum in which Bruce has participated and answered those questions. It would help if you would search through the recent archives and see what he has to say rather than us trying to rehash the whole thing.

Glenn

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It is not spurious. Bruce came up with a theory that not having the correct author included in an authorship study would skew and produce invalid results. He tested this theory by excluding Hamilton from the list even though we know that Hamilton was the author. The results are invalid because we know that Hamilton is the author.

But the NSC method Jockers used will produce winners even if the true author is not included, as it did with Rigdon et al with the Federalist papers. If the true author is not included in the Book of Mormon authorship studies, the results are invalid. Even thoug a "winner" is picked every time, the actual correlation is so far away from the actual texts as to be statistically insignificant.

There have been several threads here on this forum in which Bruce has participated and answered those questions. It would help if you would search through the recent archives and see what he has to say rather than us trying to rehash the whole thing.

Glenn

Ok point taken. I'll have a look through past posts.

just one last thing. is there any draft response to Jockers that is available for inspection? When is the paper expected to be published?

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Ok point taken. I'll have a look through past posts.

just one last thing. is there any draft response to Jockers that is available for inspection? When is the paper expected to be published?

I don't know when it will be published, but the final draft has been submitted to the LLC magazine. Bruce had to wait a long time for one reviewer to get back to him and the reviewer requested that Bruce make some changes to the prepublication draft. I do not know what the changes are. That draft is no longer available on the internet because it has been modified and that modified draft submitted for publication. We will have to wait for the final publication to get our answers. It should be fairly soon though.

Glenn

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I don't know when it will be published, but the final draft has been submitted to the LLC magazine. Bruce had to wait a long time for one reviewer to get back to him and the reviewer requested that Bruce make some changes to the prepublication draft. I do not know what the changes are. That draft is no longer available on the internet because it has been modified and that modified draft submitted for publication. We will have to wait for the final publication to get our answers. It should be fairly soon though.

Glenn

That should be good. I will then look forward to the Jockers rejoinder.

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That should be good. I will then look forward to the Jockers rejoinder.

If I can make an observation: I had this feeling that you already made up your mind and were convinced in the Jocker's study. Good to see that your mind is still open. Many have been taken in by this study, especially on the critics side because in genereal they wish to believe in any study that casts doubt on the BoM. By as Glenn has pointed out, this study does have its flaws.

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If I can make an observation: I had this feeling that you already made up your mind and were convinced in the Jocker's study. Good to see that your mind is still open. Many have been taken in by this study, especially on the critics side because in genereal they wish to believe in any study that casts doubt on the BoM. By as Glenn has pointed out, this study does have its flaws.

its good to be informed about both sides of the argument and then make a judgment. I don't think any statistical analyses will settle the issue of authorship. But it can shed some important light on the topic.

It would be good if Spalding's Manuscript Found could, well, be found. That would go some ways to settling the issue I believe. It may yet turn up somewhere.

But these studies are interesting nevertheless.

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its good to be informed about both sides of the argument and then make a judgment. I don't think any statistical analyses will settle the issue of authorship. But it can shed some important light on the topic.

It would be good if Spalding's Manuscript Found could, well, be found. That would go some ways to settling the issue I believe. It may yet turn up somewhere.

But these studies are interesting nevertheless.

It is not even determined that there was a second manucript. And that is the problem. Critics wish there to be but wishing is only a wish. But yes, it would be wondeful if a manuscript could be found complete with book of mormon names. Then we can all go home and relax and enjoy.

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It would be good if Spalding's Manuscript Found could, well, be found. That would go some ways to settling the issue I believe. It may yet turn up somewhere.

It was found. It turned out it didn't match what the critics claimed at all. Then the critics just asserted that there was an additional manuscript that was still lost that really matched what they claimed. See here.

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