The Mormonism Thread 2.0

[°Leprechaun]

Of course, although there are a number of Mormon sects, most people belong to the largest one, and we don't often hear much about the other ones.

The second largest, for example, is much smaller than the largest:

http://www.cofchrist.org/

[LabourJersey]

Yeah, this book (which was dictated in three months with zero resources) totally seems like the work of a conman

/s

What does "discriminant function analysis" mean in this context? And how do graphs of this kind of analysis look if you compare books of two authors across time periods.

If you were comparing Shakespeare to say, Philip Roth, would clusters of their writing look like this graph? be much further spaced out?

You can't just provide this graph with no methodology or context.

[Aurelius]

Yeah, this book (which was dictated in three months with zero resources) totally seems like the work of a conman

/s

What does "discriminant function analysis" mean in this context? And how do graphs of this kind of analysis look if you compare books of two authors across time periods.

If you were comparing Shakespeare to say, Philip Roth, would clusters of their writing look like this graph? be much further spaced out?

You can't just provide this graph with no methodology or context.

Yeah, this could easily just mean that Smith's personal writings are less formal than the Book of Mormon, for example, which wouldn't prove anything about authorship.

[Хahar 🤔]

Yeah, this book (which was dictated in three months with zero resources) totally seems like the work of a conman

/s

What does "discriminant function analysis" mean in this context? And how do graphs of this kind of analysis look if you compare books of two authors across time periods.

If you were comparing Shakespeare to say, Philip Roth, would clusters of their writing look like this graph? be much further spaced out?

You can't just provide this graph with no methodology or context.

I don't know what the graph is taken from (and the original post here is gone, anyway), but this looks to me like the product of principal components analysis. I won't bore anyone here with the math, but PCA is used when you have many variables (in this case, perhaps there are numbers referring to various attributes of each text) and you want to reduce it to two variables that you can plot against each other. Each of the two variables of the output is a combination of however many variables there were in the input.

Personally I dislike PCA a lot for a lot of the reasons that other people like it. It's fairly easy for a non-expert to use and produce a nice-looking chart that can be suggestive, but on the other hand it's easy for non-experts to use because it's basically a black box. In this case we don't know what the variables are that make Joseph Smith's private writings stand out, but just looking at the graph is meant to suffice to show us that they're special.

[vitoNova]

Many people don't know this, but there's entire apartment blocks reserved for the Mormon Mafia here in Crystal City National Landing.  

They're taking over.

[LabourJersey]

Many people don't know this, but there's entire apartment blocks reserved for the Mormon Mafia here in Crystal City National Landing.  

They're taking over.

Mormons in Bezos Country! What a combination