"Opinions of Printers" -- Benjamin Franklin on the Interpreter

From Benjamin Franklin’s “Apology for Printers” in the Pennsylvania Gazette, 1731:

Printers are educated in the Belief that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter. Hence they cheerfully serve all contending Writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the Question in Dispute. . . .

It is likewise as unreasonable what some assert, That Printers ought not to print anything but what they approve, since if all of that Business should make such a Resolution, and abide by it, an End would thereby be put to Free Writing, and the World would afterwards have nothing to read but what happen’d to be the Opinions of Printers.

[From the Wall St. Journal, Notable and Quotable, June 19, 2016, here.]

The Interpreter and the Baker Street Journal

Welcome to those who are coming here for the first time, thanks to the latest Interpreter article.

I started this blog several months ago because of my interest in Book of Mormon geography, but I haven't posted much lately because so many people--including subscribers--told me they stopped reading the Interpreter because they found the articles increasingly dogmatic and unbelievable. Although sometimes there is some good non-Mesoamerican material in it, the Interpreter is basically a continuation of the worst of FARMS, as I've pointed out previously here.

The Interpreter is a vehicle for the citation cartel to convey an illusion of credibility; i.e., so long as you reinforce the Groupthink, you can publish your article in the Interpreter, then cite the Interpreter when you're really just citing yourself (or your like-minded collaborators) in an article on FairMormon or any of the other outlets for the cartel.

If you have the time, it's a lot of fun to read, once you realize the Interpreter is kind of like a Star Trek fan club. Or the Baker Street Journal.

Back in 1934, Christopher Morley created an organization of Sherlock Holmes fans titled the Baker Street Irregulars to debate  the Holmes canon among themselves. They generated enough material by 1946 that they started a magazine titled The Baker Street Journal. It's circulation never exceeded 2,000, which led Morley to paraphrase Winston Churchill with this:

"Never has so much been written by so many for so few."

Of course, the problem is that the few are the citation cartel; i.e., the LDS intellectuals who use the Interpreter to confirm their Groupthink in an Orwellian way. IMO, the worst aspect of the whole enterprise is the way it is indoctrinating bright LDS students at BYU into thinking this is the way to become a scholar.

Life is short, and in my opinion, unless you're fascinated by the intellectual history and development of LDS scholarship at BYU/CES or you're obsessed with confirming your bias for the Mesoamerican setting for the Book of Mormon, reading the Interpreter is a waste of time. Consequently, I only do peer reviews now when enough people ask me to do so.  

If the day ever comes that the Interpreter changes to become an academic journal, you'll know it because of the diversity of views it publishes and a change toward academic rigor. But don't hold your breath.

Not that it matters, anyway. The Mesoamerican fan club won't be around much longer, anyway, now that people can see the theory originated from a historical mistake and is perpetuated only by Orwellian tactics that won't survive the Internet.

Chiasm in the Interpreter

I've been asked to comment on the Interpreter's article on the chiasm I proposed for Alma 22:27. I'm doing an interlinear commentary that will be out next week.

At the outset, I reiterate my overall approach to the question of Book of Mormon geography. It is impossible to develop a coherent "abstract geography" because the text is too vague. That's why there are dozens or hundreds of proposed geography theories.

But I don't think that's a defect in the text; ancient texts are inherently vague because people didn't have measurement technology that we're accustomed to now. Try to construct an abstract map of the Bible without using any of the sites we know today and you'll see what I mean. Even after centuries of research, we don't know where Mount Sinai is. When I studied Greek, we read Xenophon's Adabasis as a text. Good luck constructing a consensus abstract map from that. So in a real sense, the inherent vagueness of the Book of Mormon is another evidence of its authenticity as an ancient text.

And yet, we do have maps of the Bible and of Xenophon's march through Persia. Why? Because we know--by extrinsic evidence--where certain cities are located. With those known locations, we can sort out most of the rest (but not all, as Sinai demonstrates).

To understand Book of Mormon geography, I started with a hypothesis that we have two "pins in the map" from the D&C: Cumorah in New York (D&C 128) and Zarahemla in Iowa (D&C 125). I recognized that both of them are controversial, but these are, after all, canonized statements.

To text my hypothesis, I tackled the text to see if the geography passages fit those pins in the map. I didn't know what the outcome would be, but after doing the work, I reached the conclusion that the text does actually fit those two pins. The fit is far better than I thought would be possible, based on my decades of following the ongoing chaos of the Mesoamerican theories.

With this understanding of the text, everything is reconciled: the text, what Joseph and Oliver said, Church history events, and the archaeology, anthropology, geology, and geography.

It was a big difference from how I'd understood these issues for decades.

To accept the Mesoamerican theory, like all Mormons who accept that theory, I had to reject two of the three witnesses. I had to assume Joseph Smith wrote anonymous articles in the Times and Seasons, changed his mind, speculated--and after all that, was factually wrong. I had to believe the text was mistranslated because Joseph didn't understand Mayan culture. I had to believe the experts at BYU and CES were right about all of this because... well, because they were the experts. In believing all of this, I had to accept the citation cartel's logical fallacies, misrepresented citations, and ad hominem attacks against anyone who challenged them.

I have to say, I was happy to reject the Mesoamerican theory.

So I wrote Moroni's America.

I'm glad to see the Interpreter publish a review. I'll incorporate the feedback into the second edition, along with all the other feedback I'm getting.

I think it would be even better if the Interpreter would publish my articles, or at least my response and/or rebuttals, but the editors have told me they won't publish my material because they disagree with it, and they censure my comments when I try to post them to their web page, so the only outlet I have is these blogs.

One of the first things I looked for in the latest Interpreter article was a reference to Oliver Cowdery and Letter VII. There is none. Consequently, the entire premise for Moroni's America is ignored in this review.

Surely that's not merely an oversight.

But again, I appreciate the review and I hope this can lead to additional productive discussions with everyone interested in the topic.

On the love of Truth

I read this today and thought of the Interpreter.

"It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another thing to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth."

It's from an essay titled "On the love of Truth" in Essays on some of the difficulties in the writings of the Apostle Paul and other parts of the New Testament by Whately, Richard, 1787-1863. The book was published in 1830.

[I like books published in 1830.]

As everyone who reads this blog knows, in my opinion the Interpreter is a peer-approved publication that seeks to confirm the biases of the citation cartel that control it. As such, it's the opposite of a peer-reviewed journal in the traditional sense of a search for truth. The Interpreter does publish some good material, but also publishes some deplorable material; the only criteria for publication seems to be whether the citation cartel agrees with the content (or agrees enough to allow some slight variations at the edges).

Whately explains the Interpreter's citation cartel here: "The minds of most men are pre-occupied by some feeling or other which influences their judgment, either on the side of truth or of error, as it may happen, and enlists their learning and ability on the side, whatever it may be, which they are predisposed to adopt."
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Here's the context of these quotations from Whately:

4. When, however, we have made up our minds as to the importance of seeking in every case for truth, with an unprejudiced mind, the greatest difficulty still remains; which arises
from the confidence we are apt to feel that we have already done this, and have sought for 
truth with success.

For every one must of course be convinced of the truth of his own opinion, if it be properly called his opinion ; and yet the variety of men's opinions furnishes a proof how many must be mistaken. If any one then would guard against mistake as far as his intellectual faculties will allow, he must make it, not the second, but the first question in each case, " Is this true ? "

It is not enough to believe what you maintain ; you must maintain what you believe ; and maintain it because you believe it, and that, on the most careful and impartial review of the evidence on both sides. For any one may bring himself to believe almost any thing that he is inclined to believe, and thinks it becoming or expedient to maintain. It makes all the difference, therefore, whether we begin or end with the enquiry as to the truth of our doctrines.

To express the same maxim in other words, it is one thing to wish to have Truth on our side, and another thing to wish sincerely to be on the side of Truth. There is no genuine love of truth implied in the former. Truth is a powerful auxiliary, such as every one wishes to have on his side ; every one is rejoiced to find, and therefore often succeeds in convincing himself, that the principles he is already disposed to adopt, the notions he is inclined to defend, may be maintained as true.

A determination to "obey the Truth," and to follow wherever she may lead, is not so common. In this consists the genuine love of truth ; and this can be realized in practice only by postponing all other questions to that which ought ever to come foremost, "What is the Truth ?" The minds of most men are pre-occupied by some feeling or other which influences their judgment, either on the side of truth or of error, as it may happen, and enlists their learning and ability on the side, whatever it may be, which they are predisposed to adopt.

Brief overview

There are a lot of new people coming to this blog so here's a brief overview of what we're doing here.

This blog focuses on the Interpreter primarily because that online magazine has a very narrow and specific agenda regarding Book of Mormon geography: i.e., it seeks to promote the Mesoamerican theory. The Interpreter purports to be peer-reviewed, but in my opinion it is, instead, peer-approved. I've read the Interpreter for a long time, and there are some good articles published there, but there are also a lot of deplorable articles reminiscent of the worst of FARMS.

I'm hardly the only one who feels this way. People tell me all the time that they've stopped reading it, that it poorly reflects on LDS scholarship, etc. Because it's obvious the Interpreter is not actually peer-reviewed, I decided to offer my own peer reviews from time to time. I'm doing so in the hope that the Interpreter will someday live up to its purported standards and objectives of being a legitimate peer-reviewed outlet for LDS scholarship. Unfortunately, so far the editors instead have turned it into a continuation of the late-stage FARMS publications, which led, deservedly, to the firing of some of the same people who are now running the Interpreter. That said, in my discussions with various LDS scholars, there seems to be an inordinate desire for bias confirmation of the type that appears in the Interpreter. So maybe my expectations are unrealistic; maybe the Interpreter is doing exactly what it intends. In that case, I don't expect the Interpreter to change; instead, I offer my peer reviews here for those who want to know what an actual peer review would look like, and who want a faithful alternative perspective.

My primary focus so far has been on Church history and Book of Mormon historicity, so I'm cross-posting the following comments that originally appeared at http://bookofmormonconsensus.blogspot.com/ and http://bookofmormonwars.blogspot.com/
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Most readers of the Book of Mormon naturally want to know where the events took place. Where in the New World did Lehi land? Where was Zarahemla? Where was Cumorah?

In recent decades, LDS scholars have claimed the Book of Mormon took place in Central America (Mesoamerica). Their work has infiltrated Church media, lesson manuals, and literature. The origin of the theory is a series of anonymous articles in the 1842 Times and Seasons, the Church newspaper in Nauvoo. I researched the origin of those articles and wrote a book called The Lost City of Zarahemla. Basically, the focus on Mesoamerica has been a huge mistake, based on a faulty premise, and this blog seeks to correct the mistake by encouraging LDS scholars and those who have accepted their theories to take another look at the issue.

For about a hundred years, the only certain Book of Mormon location was Cumorah; i.e., the hill Cumorah near Palmyra in New York was the same Cumorah where the Nephites (and Jaredites) had the final battles that destroyed their civilizations.

Then, in the 1930s, some scholars claimed Cumorah had to be in Mesoamerica (the so-called Two Cumorah theory). in 1936, Joseph Fielding Smith, who by then had been an Apostle for 26 years and Church Historian and Recorder for 15 years (he was Assistant Church Historian for 15 years before that), addressed the Two Cumorah theory in words that, sadly, are just as true today as they were then:

"This modernistic theory of necessity, in order to be consistent, must place the waters of Ripliancum and the Hill Cumorah some place within the restricted territory of Central America, notwithstanding the teachings of the Church to the contrary for upwards of 100 years. Because of this theory some members of the Church have become confused and greatly disturbed in their faith in the Book of Mormon. It is for this reason that evidence is here presented to show that it is not only possible that these places could be located as the Church has held during the past century, but that in very deed such is the case."

I wrote about Cumorah in my book Letter VII: Oliver Cowdery's Message to the World about the Hill Cumorah. In Letter VII, Oliver Cowdery described the last battle and said it was a fact that the final battles took place there in New York. Joseph Smith had his scribes copy Cowdery's description into his own journal. Letter VII was republished several times before Joseph died in 1844. It was accepted doctrine, as Joseph Fielding Smith explained.

Nevertheless, many LDS scholars, including those affiliated with BYU, to this day reject Cowdery's Letter VII, along with the New York Cumorah. Right now, this semester, in 2016, BYU students are still being taught the Mesoamerican theory.

I find that appalling.

At the same time, I empathize with the scholars. They've published Mesoamerican material for decades. They've traveled to Mesoamerica, taken tours, and tried every which way to find "correspondences" between Nephite and Mayan culture. It's not easy to change one's views, especially when one's career has focused on a particular theory. For decades, I, too, accepted the Mesoamerican theory.

I'm a lawyer by profession, and I have degrees in business and economics, and I've been involved with science in my work as a lawyer, educator, and venture capitalist, so I'm pretty much an empiricist. I think truth is truth; i.e., spiritual truth is also manifest in the physical world. I wanted to test a hypothesis: If Cumorah is in New York, and Zarahemla is in Iowa (see D&C 125), does the text describe a North American setting with those two pins in the map? The result is my book, Moroni's America. I think the Book of Mormon text describes North America, with Lehi landing in Florida, the city of Nephi in Tennessee, the city of Zarahemla across from Nauvoo in Iowa, the land of Zarahemla extending through Illinois, Cumorah in New York, etc. It's all spelled out in the book and in various web pages.

This blog is not going through the geography point-by-point. In fact, I don't want the scholars to simply take my word for it. I want them to clear their minds of the Mesoamerican ideology and take a fresh look at the text. I want them to test the same hypothesis I did; i.e., that Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith were correct about Cumorah. If they do so, I think they'll reach the same conclusions I have about Book of Mormon geography.

Meanwhile, I hope LDS people everywhere will take the time to learn about these things because it is faith affirming to realize that Joseph and Oliver were 1) consistent and 2) accurate. The Book of Mormon did take place in North America, in the area currently known as Florida, Tennessee, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, etc.

Interpreter's groupthink

Like FARMS before it, the Interpreter has developed an impenetrable groupthink about certain topics, buttressed by the citation cartel. I came across the following article about a similar development in another field. I think you'll find the comparison fascinating. I put a few highlights in bold. (Hint: substitute "Mesoamerican" for "left-wing.")
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At the back of a small room at Coogee Beach, Sydney, I sat watching as a psychologist I had never heard of paced the room gesticulating. His voice was loud. Over six feet tall, his presence was imposing. It was Lee Jussim. He had come to the Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology to talk about left-wing bias in social psychology.

Left-wing bias, he said, was undermining his field. Graduate students were entering the field in order to change the world rather than discover truths.1 Because of this, he said, the field was riddled with flaky research and questionable theories.

Jussim’s talk began with one of the most egregious examples of bias in recent years. He drew the audience’s attention to the paper: “NASA faked the moon landing – therefore (climate) science is a hoax.” The study was led by Stephan Lewandowsky, and published in Psychological Science in 2013. The paper argued that those who believed that the moon landing was a hoax also believed that climate science was a fraud. The abstract stated:

We…show that endorsement of a cluster of conspiracy theories (e.g., that the CIA killed Martin-Luther King or that NASA faked the moon landing) predicts rejection of climate science as well as the rejection of other scientific findings above and beyond commitment to laissez-faire free markets. This provides confirmation of previous suggestions that conspiracist ideation contributes to the rejection of science.

After describing the study and reading the abstract, Jussim paused. Something big was coming.

“But out of 1145 participants, only ten agreed that the moon landing was a hoax!” he said. “Of the study’s participants, 97.8% who thought that climate science was a hoax, did not think that the moon landing also a hoax.”

His fellow psychologists shifted in their seats. Jussim pointed out that the level of obfuscation the authors went to, in order to disguise their actual data, was intense. Statistical techniques appeared to have been chosen that would hide the study’s true results. And it appeared that no peer reviewers, or journal editors, took the time, or went to the effort of scrutinizing the study in a way that was sufficient to identify the bold misrepresentations.

While the authors’ political motivations for publishing the paper were obvious, it was the lax attitude on behalf of peer reviewers – Jussim suggested – that was at the heart of the problems within social psychology. The field had become a community in which political values and moral aims were shared, leading to an asymmetry in which studies that reinforced left-wing narratives had come to be disproportionately represented in the literature. And this was not, to quote Stephen Colbert, because “reality had a liberal bias”. It was because social psychology had a liberal bias.

Jussim explained that within the field, those on the left outnumbered those on the right by a ratio of about 10:1. So it meant that even if left-leaning and right-leaning scientists were equal in their bias, there would be at least ten times more research biased towards validating left-wing narratives than conservative narratives. Adding in the apparent double standards in the peer review process (where studies validating left-wing narratives seemed to be easier to publish) then the bias within the field could vastly exceed the ratio of 10:1. In other words, research was becoming an exercise in groupthink.

...

Very early in his career, Jussim faced a crisis of sorts. An early mentor, Jacquelynne Eccles, handed him some large datasets gathered from school children and teachers in educational settings. He tried testing the social psychology theories he had studied, but consistently found that his data contradicted them.

Instead of finding that the teachers’ expectations influenced the students’ performances, he found that the students’ performances influenced the teachers’ expectations. This data “misbehaved”. It did not show that stereotypes created, or even had much influence on the real world. The data did not show that teachers’ expectations strongly limited students’ performances. It did not show that stereotypes became self-fulfilling prophecies. But instead of filing his results away into a desk drawer, Jussim kept investigating – for three more decades.

Some months after Jussim’s presentation at the 2015 Sydney Symposium, the results of the Reproducibility Project in psychology were announced. This project found that out of 100 psychological studies, only about 30%-50% could be replicated.

The reproducibility project follows in the wake of a crisis that has engulfed social psychology in recent years. A slew of classic studies have never been able to be fully replicated. (Replication is a benchmark of the scientific method. If a study cannot be replicated, it suggests that the results were a fluke, and not an accurate representation of the real world).

For example, Bargh, Chen and Burrows published one of the most famous experiments of the field in 19963. In it, students were divided into two groups: one group received priming with the stereotype of elderly people; the other students received no priming (the control group). When the students left the experiment, those who had been primed with the stereotype of the elderly, walked down a corridor significantly more slowly than the students assigned to the control. While it has never been completely replicated, it has been cited over 3400 times. It also features in most social psychology textbooks.

Another classic study by Darley & Gross published in 1983, found that people applied a stereotype about social class when they saw a young girl taking a math test, but did not when they saw a young girl not taking a math test.5 Two attempts at exact replication have failed.6 And both replication attempts actually found theopposite pattern – that people apply stereotypes when they have no other information about a person, but switch them off when they do.6

In the field of psychology, what counts as a “replication” is controversial. Researchers have not yet reached a consensus on whether a replication means that an effect of the same size was found. Or that an effect size was found within the same confidence intervals. Or whether it is an effect in the same direction. How one defines replication will likely impact whether one sees a “replication” as being successful or not. So while some of social psychology’s classic studies have not beenfully replicated, there have been partial replications, and a debate still rages around what exactly constitutes one. But here’s the kicker: even in the partial replications of some of these stereotype studies, the research has been found to be riddled with p-hacking.4 (P-hacking refers to the exploitation of researcher degrees of freedom until a desirable result is found).

http://quillette.com/2015/12/04/rebellious-scientist-surprising-truth-about-stereotypes/

I haven't forgotten about the Interpreter

Some people are asking why I haven't posted here in a while. One answer is I've been too busy on other projects. Another is that they've published some good material recently, which makes my point.

I enjoy the Interpreter overall; it's only, or primarily, on the issue of Book of Mormon geography that the Interpreter is a dogmatic, arrogant and cynical journal that has come to resemble the later years of FARMS. I'm still hoping for a change at the Interpreter, sooner or later, in this respect.

That said, there is still plenty of material from the past that needs some actual peer reviewing...