Fun with Dice in a Workshop for Management

“Facts”
and “data” are what most people use when they make decisions,
especially decisions that others see as hopelessly biased and idiotic.
The challenge is learning how to interpret facts and how to analyze data
so that are decisions are less likely to be blunders based on the many
biases and fallacies that can mislead all of us.

In a
training class on decision making that I was invited to do for managers
in one of my employer’s groups in China, I brought in a big bag of dice
to help local managers understand a serious example of self-deception in
leadership. In particular, I sought to illustrate why criticism of
employees for poor results seems to work better than praise for good
results. It’s an example where solid experience and significant data can
actually mislead and deceive..

Everybody in a group of
about 50 people were given three dice. I then explained their KPIs (Key
Performance Indicators–an important phrase in modern Bizspeak) for the
exercise: the company needs high scores. Everyone was asked to shake
their dice and roll them once, then record their score. The few with the
highest scores (e.g., a sum of 15 or higher) were brought up to the
front. A group with about the same number of people with the lowest
scores (e.g., less than 6) was also brought up to the front.

Now
it was time for their performance review. I approached the high
performers and personally congratulated them. I shook each person’s
hand, thanked them for their amazing achievement, gave them gifts (a
candy bar) and cash incentives (a Chinese bill–real money), and praised
them as good examples for the rest of the company. The whole room then
joined me in loud applause for these high-achievers.

Then
it was time for consequences for the low-performers. I shook my head,
grimaced, wagged my finger at them, and scolded them for their failure
in giving such disappointing results. They were a shame to the company,
and we might need to demote them or fire them if they didn’t shape up.

With
proper rewards and punishments having been meted out, the people in
these two outlier groups were given three more dice each and allowed to
roll again. Amazingly, the average score of the former top performers
now dropped significantly. Almost everyone in that team did more poorly
after receiving praise and rewards. But for the ones who had been
scolded and criticized, a notable improvement was observed. Almost all
of them showed significant gains in their scores. Wow, praise hurts and
criticism helps, right?

This pattern is fairly
reproducible, and coincides with the vast experience of many coaches,
bosses, generals, and leaders of all kinds: criticism and punishment
works better than praise; yelling works better than kindness. They have
solid experience to prove it, and they are often right, in a sense, but
also perhaps terribly wrong.

Obviously, the results
with the dice were not likely to be affected by praise or rewards (as
long as the participants behaved honestly). What was happening here is a
common statistical phenomenon that results in a great deal of
self-deception in many fields of life. The phenomenon is “regression to
the mean.” When there is a degree of randomness, as there is in much of
life, random trends that depart above or below the mean tend to come
back. Results that are extreme are often statistical outliers,
explainable by chance, that are not necessarily caused by the
explanations we try to concoct. It’s why athletes who make it to the
cover of famous sports magazines after a string of remarkable successes
tend to disappoint immediately after, leading to the “Sports Illustrated
jinx” which may not be a real jinx at all. It’s the reason why highly
intelligent women such as my wife tend to marry men who are less
intelligent, like certain bloggers around here. Since the correlation
between female and male intelligence in marriage is not perfect and
therefore involves some degree of randomness, the most intelligent
outliers among females will tend to marry men who are not such extreme
outliers themselves, and the probability is that they will tend to be
less intelligent. This works both ways.

Two Books That Inspired My Workshop

My
experiment with dice and other parts of my workshop were inspired in
part by two outstanding books that I recommend. The exercise with dice
was inspired by a story in Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel
Kahneman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011). I picked this up
for airplane reading a couple years ago and found a real gem that I have
applied in a variety of ways, though I still readily fall into many of
the fallacies of human thought that so easily beset us. The story that
motivated my dice exercise for management came from Chapter 17,
“Regression to the Mean,” pp. 175-176.

Kahneman, winner
of the Nobel Prize in economics, once taught Israeli air force
instructors about the psychology of effective training. He stressed an
important principle: that rewards for improved performance worked better
than punishment for mistakes. This is something that we employees tend
to understand easily, but is often a mystery to those dishing out the
punishments and rewards. One of the instructors challenged him and said
that this principle was refuted by his own extensive experience. When a
cadet performed exceptionally well and was praised, he would usually do
worse on the next exercise. But when someone performed poorly and was
criticized, he usually did better on the next run. This was a “a joyous
moment of insight” to Kahneman, who recognized an important application
of what he had been teaching for years about the regression to the mean.
The instructor had been looking for a cause-and-effect explanation to
natural, random fluctuations, and had developed an iron-clad theory that
was dead wrong. He had extensive real data, but had been deceived by a
failure to understand the impact of randomness. Real data + bad
statistics (or bad math) = bogus conclusions.

Regression
to the mean is one of several important principles Kahnema discusses.
Many have roots in mathematics. All have connections to human psychology
and the way our brains work. Kahneman is brilliant in illustrating how
often we make flawed decisions, and gives us some tools to overcome
these tendencies.

Related to Kahneman’s work is another
math-oriented book which I relied on in my workshop on decision making,
and which I highly recommend: Jordan Ellenberg, How Not to be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking (New York: Penguin Press, 2014).

Ellenberg
shows how basic mathematics can quickly expose many of the fallacies
that we make in our thinking and decision making. Some of his
discussions have application to matters that come up in discussions of
LDS religion and in evaluation of evidence to support or discredit a
theory. He decimates one of the classic “Texas sharpshooter” disasters
in religious circles, the utterly bogus methodology used in The Bible Code
in which the Hebrew text of the Old Testament was treated as a
miraculous, absolutely perfect text filled with hidden prophecies that
could be obtained by mathematically rearranging the letters of the text
in numerous different grid patterns and then searching for new words in
something of a hidden-word puzzle. With computerized tools, thousands of
grids could be formed to lay out the letters in new two-dimensional
patterns and then these patterns were searched to find all sorts of
modern topics.

There’s an old joke about a man in Texas
who took a rifle and fired a few dozen random rounds into the side of a
barn. Wherever the shots were clustered together, he painted a target
around them and then told people that he was a sharpshooter. Drawing
circles around spaced-apart Hebrew letters on, say, arrangement number
47, 356 and finding a hidden prophecy is analogous to the Texas
sharpshooter.

Further, the very premise of a perfect
text for the study is completely without logic. There are multiple
versions of the ancient Torah with obvious gaps and uncertainties (e.g., compare the Torah in the Dead Sea Scrolls to the version used today: there are differences).
Changing one letter in the text would through off the alignments on the
selected grid patterns that give mystical results, making the whole
exercise obviously bogus.

In “Dead Fish Don’t Read
Minds” (Chapter 7), Ellenberg warns of the dangers of amplifying noise
into false positives when we have the resources of Big Data to play
with. With numerous variables to explore and map, it is incredibly easy
to find some that seem to correlate. This was brilliantly illustrated in
a real but still somewhat tongue-in-cheek paper that managed to be accepted for presentation at the 2009
Organization for Human Brain Mapping in San Francisco, where UC Santa
Barbara neuroscientist Craig Bennett presented a poster called “Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparison corrections.” (See discussion at Scientific American.) 
Basically, this paper reported statistical results from MRI brain
mapping taken in a dead fish as the fish was shown photos of people in
different emotional states. Dr. Bennett used the power of Big Data to
explore MRI signals from millions of positions and found a couple spots
in the fish’s neural architecture where the fluctuates corresponded well
with the emotional state shown in the photos. His paper was a clever
way of illustrating the dangers of using Big Data to find correlations
that really don’t mean anything, much like the work to find “smoking
guns” for Book of Mormon plagiarism by doing computer searches of short
phrases with hundreds of thousands of books to toy with.

Ellenberg
is often critical of religion and believers, and probably with good
reason, and mocks some aspects of the Bible a time or two, but religious
people can learn much from his mathematically sound approach to
thinking.

What Are the Odds of That? Actually, Unlikely Results are Guaranteed

The
many fallacies explored by Kahneman and Ellenberg can affect all of us
in our thinking and decision making. When it comes to apologetics,
Latter-day Saints can fall into related traps if we treat anything from
anywhere, anytime as potentially being a relevant parallel to the Book
of Mormon or other LDS works. Not every New World drawing of people in
two or more tones implies that we are looking at Nephites and Lamanites.
Not every drawing of a horse means we are looking at evidence for Book
of Mormon horses. And a place called Nehem on a map of Arabia is not
necessarily evidence that a name like Nahom existed anywhere in Arabia
in Lehi’s day. Those things can be random parallels. If they are
meaningful, there should be further data that can support the hypotheses
put forward. Such finds would be most meaningful if they are part of a
large body of information from multiple sources that can serve as
convergences useful in assessing the particular question at hand, such
as “Is the story of Lehi’s trail plausible? Could there have been a
place called Nahom where Ishmael was buried, with a fertile place like
Bountiful nearly due east?” Such questions can be framed in ways that do
not leave the infinite wiggle room of Bible Code explorations.
(It was such a question, in fact, that motivated Warren Aston to
undertake exploration in the Arabian Peninsula at great personal cost
with predetermined criteria for Bountiful, a target already drawn before
he ever touched the coast of Oman.)

When we are
exploring a hypothesis, false positives can easily result from errors in
thinking due to failure to understand randomness and regression to the
mean, as well as other mathematical and logical fallacies. A key element
in the field of statistics is recognizing that a random result can seem
to support a hypothesis when there is not actually a cause-and-effect
relationship. The science of statistics provides tools and tests to help
differentiate between what is random and what is real, though it
certainty is almost always elusive. Statistics gives us some tools to help reduce the risk of seeing things
that aren’t there, or to know when we might be missing something that
is (these topics involves the issues of “significance” and “power,” for example). Even for those trained in
statistics, there are abundant errors that can be made and false
conclusions made.

I’m not a statistician, but I did
have 10 hours of graduate level statistics and have frequently had to
rely on statistics to assess hypotheses. I even published a little paper
on a mathematical issue related to a statistical issue known as the
“collector’s problem.” The publication (peer-reviewed, but still lightweight, IMO) is J.D. Lindsay, “A New Solution for the
Probability of Completing Sets in Random Sampling: Definition of the
‘Two-Dimensional Factorial’,” The Mathematical
Scientist, 17: 101-110 (1992), which you can also read online
as a Web page or as a Word document. But what really
matters is that I am married to a statistician (M.Sc. degree in
statistics, now math teacher at an international school in
Shanghai)–what are the odds of that? Well, 100%, since that’s what
happened.

That reminds me of the many mistakes that
people on both sides of the debate can make as they argue probabilities.
It’s easy to see significance in something that happens by chance,
especially when we find something that did happen, possibly by chance,
and then try to make a case for how improbable that was. Richard Feynman
once joked to a class that one the way to campus that morning, he saw a
car with a specific license plate, ARW 357. “Of all the millions of license plates in the state, what was the chance that I would see that particular one tonight?” This fallacy of a posteriori
conclusions is an easy one to make. It’s inevitable that any particular
license plate will be rare, maybe even unique in all the world or at
least all the state. That odds of that happening are low–a priori,
before the event–but a posteriori, the odds are high, as in
100%. Making much of something because it is unusual is an error. But
again, today, much of the serious evidence being raised for Book of
Mormon plausibility is not of that nature.

Parallels occur
all over the place. Parallel words, themes, and motifs occur across
large bodies of literature, even when they are surely unrelated. I can
take any two texts and find some parallels. Within a sufficiently large
text, I can probably find parallel words and phrases that I can sketch
out as a chiasmus. If we scour all the names introduced in the Book of
Mormon, we should not be surprised to find a few might have apparent
connections to ancient languages. We might even not be shocked to find
an occasional one whose purported meaning might be construed to relate
well to its context. But when numerous names begin to have support and
offer useful new meaning for the text, when things like Hebraic
wordplays occur many times and in interesting, meaningful ways, then the
evidence can become more significant. When linguistic and
archaeological evidence bring about interesting and repeated
convergences, it may be time to take a deeper look at the evidence
rather than assuming it’s all chance.

Seemingly
unlikely findings are actually quite likely to happen. That truism,
however, is not an excuse to disregard meaningful bodies of evidence and
convergences that enlighten a text in question.

Progress in Avoiding False Positives

Fortunately,
the risk of methodological fallacies is frequently and openly
considered among many LDS apologists, contrary to the allegations of
critics who sometimes seem blind to their own biases and methodological
flaws.

For example, while chiasmus can and does occur
randomly, just as rhymes and other aspects of poetry can be found in
random text, there are reasonable criteria for evaluating the strength
of a chiasmus that can help screen random chaff from deliberately
crafted gems. The possibility of false positives was an important factor
in the analysis of John Welch as he explored the role of chiasmus in
scripture. Others build upon his foundation and even offered statistical
tools for evaluating chiasmus. It is still possible for something that
appears elegant, compact, and brilliantly crafted to be an unintended
creation, but we can speak of probability and plausibility in making
reasonable evaluations.

In the early days of LDS
apologetics, evidence of all kind was enthusiastically accepted. But
gradually, I see LDS writers becoming more nuanced and cautious. A prime
example of this is, in my opinion, Brant Gardner in his book, Traditions of the Fathers: The Book of Mormon as History
(Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2015). He is fully aware of the
risk of fallacious parallels, but in evaluating the relationship between
a text and history, they must be considered. What matters is how they
are considered and what they data can plausibly support. On page 47
[visible in an online preview],
Gardner discusses an insight from William Dever, a prominent professor
of Near Eastern archaeology and anthropology at the University of
Arizona who has been excavating in the Near East for several decades:

Some form of comparison between text and history is always required to discern

historicity.
Texts are always compared to archaeology and/or other texts. Sometimes
even artifacts require explanation by comparison or analogy to similar
artifacts from another culture. Comparisons must be made. The problem
cannot, therefore, reside in an absolute deficit in any methodology that
makes comparisons, but rather in the way the comparisons are made and
made to be significant. One important type of controlled parallel is
ethnographic analogy. Dever explains his version of this method:

One
aspect shared by both biblical scholarship and archaeology is a
dependence on analogy as a fundamental method of argument. . . .

The
challenge is to find appropriate analogues, those offering the most
promise yet capable of being tested in some way. Ethnoarchaeology is
useful in this regard, particularly in places where unsophisticated
modern cultures are still found superimposed, as it were, upon the
remains of the ancient world, as in parts of the Middle East. Analogies
drawn from life of modern Arab villages or Bedouin society can, with
proper controls, be used to illuminate both artifacts and texts, as many
studies have shown. [William G. Dever, What Did the Biblical Writers Know and When Did They Know It? What Archaeology Can Tell Us About the Reality of Ancient Israel (Grand rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2001), pp. 77-78.]

Dever’s
work deals with the concept of “convergences” wherein multiple lines of
evidence, such as evidence from archaeology and from a text, come
together and support the historicity of a text in question. In spite of
the risk of fallacious parallels or false positives, convergences can be
strong and can create compelling cases for the historicity of a text.
Dever’s work is also relied on by John Sorenson in Mormon’s Codex,
where extensive correspondences between Mesoamerica and the Book of
Mormon in many different topical areas are explored. Gardner observes
his requirements for a convergence are more demanding than the criteria
in Sorenson’s approach. But I feel both authors are aware of the risk of
random parallels being mistaken as evidence, and are seeking to provide
a thorough methodology that combines multiple approaches to establish
meaningful though tentative connections that do more than just buttress
one point, but which also provide a framework that solves other problems
and makes more sense of the text. Convergences that are fruitful and
lead to new meaningful discoveries are the most interesting and
compelling, though there is always the risk of being wrong.

Gardner’s
approach also draws upon wisdom from the field of linguistics, which
offers many analogies to the problems of evaluating the historicity of a
text based on parallels and convergences.

As a result
of my orientation, I suggest that we will be best served by an approach
applied with great success in the field of historical linguistics. Bruce
L. Pearson describes both the problem and the solution:

Sets
of words exhibiting similarities in both form and meaning may be
presumed to be cognates, given that the languages involved are assumed
to be related. This of course is quite circular. We need a list of
cognates to show that languages are related, but we first need to know
that the languages are related before we may safely look for cognates.
In actual practice, therefore, the hypothesis builds slowly, and there
may be a number of false starts along the way. But gradually certain
correspondence patterns begin to emerge. These patterns point to
unsuspected cognates that reveal additional correspondences until
eventually a tightly woven web of interlocking evidence is developed.
[Bruce L. Pearson, Introduction to Linguistic Concepts, 51]

Pearson’s
linguistic methodology describes quite nicely the problem we have in
attempting to place the Book of Mormon in history. We cannot adequately
compare the text to history unless we know that it is history. We cannot
know that it is history unless we compare the text to history. We
cannot avoid the necessity of examining parallels between the text and
history.

The problem with the fallacy of parallels is
that it doesn’t protect against false positives. What is required is a
methodology that is more recursive than simple parallels. We need a
methodology that generates the “tightly woven web of interlocking
evidence” that Pearson indicates resolves the similar issue for
historical linguists.

In my studies of foreign
language, I’ve often been intrigued by false cognates that can trick
people into imagining connections between languages that might not
exist. An interesting involves the English and Chinese words “swallow.”
In English “swallow” can be a noun involving the ingestion of food or
liquid and it can be a noun describing a particular bird. Something
similar happens in Chinese, where 燕 (yan, pronounced with a
falling tone) is the Chinese character for swallow, the bird, while the
same sound and nearly the same traditional character, 嚥, is the verb, to
swallow. The latter just adds a square at the left, representing a
mouth. It’s a cool parallel. If this kind of thing happened frequently,
or if there were, say, hundreds of ancient Chinese words that showed
connections to English, we might have a case for a systematic
relationship between the languages. But there really are not meaningful
connections between the languages apart from modern borrowed words and a
few rare occurrences that can be chalked up to chance. But exploring
parallels between languages is a vital area for research and study–it’s
how relationships between languages are established in the first place
and can help fill in huge gaps in the historical and archaeological
record. When the parallels become numerous and show patterns that begin
to make sense, it’s possible that two languages share historical
connections. To me, Gardner’s appeal to lessons from historical
linguistics makes sense. Parallels can be real and meaningful, or they
can be spurious. It’s a matter of exploring the data and being open to
convergences that enlighten and reveal useful new ways of understanding
the data.

In evaluating the Book of Mormon, I believe
LDS scholars today generally recognize that there is a risk of finding
impressive parallels to, say, ancient Mesoamerica or ancient Old World
writings that may be merely due to chance.

In my own
writings, I’ve often pointed to the risk that my conclusions are based
on chance, misunderstanding, and so forth, and use my blog as a tool to
get frequent input from critics. In spite of their repetitive dismissal
of all evidence as mere blindness, bias, and methodological fallacy on
our part, occasionally they engage with the data and provide some
helpful balance or even strong reasons to reject a hypothesis. It’s a
healthy debate. We don’t have all the answers, we are subject to biases
of many kinds, but there is still a great deal of exploration and
discovery to do that goes beyond finding random items and painting a
bullseye around it.

Sometimes the target was there
before the bullseye was there long before the bullet holes were
discovered, as in the Arabian Peninsula, which has long been a target
for criticism of the Book of Mormon before the field work was done that
helped us recognize just how many impressive hits had been scored by the
text in First Nephi.

Methodological Error: Not Unique to Mormons

Fallacies of logic and math, of course, aren’t unique to believers.

When
it comes to the Texas sharpshooter fallacy and related problems with
false positives, the critics of Mormonism also have some particular
gifts in this area as they scour modern sources to support theories of
plagiarism or modern fabrication of the Book of Mormon. Examples of
improperly finding meaning from randomness coupled with serious
methodological flaws include computer-assisted database searching among
thousands of texts for short phrases found in common with the Book of
Mormon or allegedly pointing to implausible sources for the Book of
Mormon such as the The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain.
Naturally, texts written in imitation of the King James style score
highly with their abundance of such words as “thou” and “thee” instead
of “you,” but there is no substance to the claim of plagiarism.

“Parallelomania,”
in fact, is an increasing problem in the works of critics purporting to
explain the Book of Mormon by appeals to numerous other texts. An
excellent discussion of false positives from parallels in an anti-Mormon
work is found in “Finding Parallels: Some Cautions and Criticisms, Part One” by Benjamin L. McGuire in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 5 (2013): 1-59. In Part Two, he gets more heavily into the methodology of treating parallels.

There
is no doubt that there are many parallels, as there can be between any
two unrelated texts. One of my early essays on the Book of Mormon sought
to expose the problem of false positives for those claiming Book of
Mormon plagiarism by coming up with even stronger examples of parallels
than the critics were delivering. The result was my satirical essay, “Was the Book of Mormon Plagiarized from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass?” (May 20, 2002, but slightly updated several times since then), which Brant Gardner kindly quotes from in The Book of Mormon as History
(2015, pp. 44-45). Based on the data alone, one can make a strong case
that the Book of Mormon borrowed heavily from Whitman’s 1855 work or at
least had a common source (perhaps Solomon Spaulding was plagiarized by
Whitman as well?). That’s ridiculous, of course–but the parallels show
just how easy one can be mislead by random parallels, coupled with a
little creativity and a dash of zeal. If those claiming plagiarism can’t
clearly outdo Whitman as a control, a reasonable case has not been
made.

One of latest posts at Mormanity dealt with my
explorations of a hypothesis from Noel Reynolds about the possibility of
the Book of Moses and the brass plates sharing some common material.
Reynolds’ article includes a detailed discussion of what it takes to
determine the relationship between two texts. It begins with a
consideration of the requirements for one text to depend on another. He
is aware of the risk of random parallels and discusses the issues rather carefully, aware of risks and aware of the kind of evidence that is required to find meaningful parallels. He also offers a test case also in
the Book of Abraham. Does it depend on the Book of Mormon or visa versa?
Very little sign of relationship is evidence in that case. But further tests and more rigor is needed. It’s very tentative and speculative, but interesting. Not completely illogical methodology at all, though the results are controversial.

But just as
alleged evidence sometimes falls prey to the sharpshooter fallacy as it
is improperly used to buttress a theory, the sharpshooter fallacy can
easily be misapplied to dismiss legitimate, meaningful evidence. A
noteworthy example is found when Dr. Philip Jenkins, a professor of
history, dismisses the significance of the evidence for Nahom in the
Arabian Penninsula, an important but small piece of the body of evidence
related to the plausibility of Nephi’s account of his journey through
Arabia along the route we often call Lehi’s Trail. Jenkins has this to say as he dismisses this evidence:

One other critical
point seems never to have been addressed, and the omission is amazing,
and irresponsible. Apologists argue that it is remarkable that they have
found a NHM inscription – in exactly the (inconceivably vast) area suggested by the Book of Mormon. What are the odds!

By the way, the Arabian Peninsular covers well over a million square miles.

Yes
indeed, what are the odds? Actually, that last question can and must be
answered before any significance can be accorded to this find. When you
look at all the possible permutations of NHM – as the name of a person,
place, city or tribe – how common was that element in inscriptions and
texts in the Middle East in the long span of ancient history? As we have
seen, apologists are using rock bottom evidentiary standards to claim
significance – hey, it’s the name of a tribe rather than a place, so
what?

How unusual or commonplace was NHM as a name element in
inscriptions? In modern terms, was it equivalent to “Steve” or to
“Benedict Cumberbatch”?

So were there five such NHM inscriptions
in the region in this period? A thousand? Ten thousand? And that
question is answerable, because we have so many databases of
inscriptions and local texts, which are open to scholars. We would need
figures that are precise, and not impressionistic. You might conceivably
find, in fact, that between 1000 BC and 500 AD, NHM inscriptions occur
every five miles in the Arabian peninsular, not to mention being
scattered over Iraq and Syria, so that finding one in this particular
place is random chance. Or else, the one that has attracted so much
attention really is the only one in the whole region. I have no idea.
But until someone actually goes out and does some quantitative analysis
on this, you can say precisely nothing about how probable or not such a
supposed correlation is.

It’s a fair question, but one
that has been answered for many years. The NHM name turns out to be
exceedingly rare in the Arabian Peninsula. As far as we can tell, it is
only found in the general region associated with the ancient Nihm tribe.
It’s in the region required by the Book of Mormon, with a convergence
of data showing that this tribal name was there in Lehi’s day, in a
region associated with ancient burial sites, a region where one can go
nearly due east and reach a remarkable candidate for Nephi’s Bountiful.
It’s part of an impressive set of convergences pointing to plausibility
for the journey of Lehi’s trail. In light of the new body of evidence,
the task of critics has suddenly shifted from mocking the implausibility
of Nephi’s account to explaining how obvious it all is in light of the
knowledge that Joseph and his technical advisory team surely must have
found by searching various books and maps, all the time lacking any
evidence that such materials were anywhere near, and still being unable
to explain the motivation for plucking “Nehhm” or “Nehem” off a rare
European map amidst the hundreds of other names, ignoring every
opportunity to use the map for something useful. They also fail to
explain how any of these sources could have guided Joseph to fabricate
the River of Laman and Valley of Lemuel, the place Shazer, or the place
Bountiful, each with excellent and plausible candidates. Here appeals to
the Texas sharpshooter fallacy or any other fallacy miss the reality of
serious evidence and serious convergences that demand more than casual
dismissal and scenarios devoid of explanatory power.

Yes, it’s fair and important to worry about false positive (and false negatives) as we approach issues of evidence for the Book of Mormon, and against the Book of Mormon as well. Methodology, logic, and intellectual soundness are fair topics for debate. Let’s keep that in mind as we explore the issues and watch out for the many fallacies that can catch us on either side of the debate.