TheDiddleyMan

I was corresponding with a friend and the topic got onto the "bible codes". He mentionned to me the book by Jeffrey Satinover. He said that Satinover claims that a group of to mathematicians and staticians were getting together in attempts to show how the codes could have been by chance but that they addmitted failure. IOW, they concluded the codes couldn't have been by chance.

Now, have I been given wrong information here, because I have never heard of any group of scientists or staticians making such a statement. Is Satinover being dishonest? Has my friend given
me bad information?

Thank you,

Kevin

topane

Sounds like Satinover's full of shit:

Assassinations foretold in Moby Dick
CSICOP's Bible Code page
Skeptic's Dictionary Bible Code entry

Wyz_sub10

It would help if he could identify what group of statisticians when, where and how.

It's easy to say "I rock like no one else. A group of music experts gathered to prove me wrong, but they couldn't."

Muad'Dib

Some colleagues of my undergrad cryptology professor did the same thing a few years back with a Hebrew translation of War and Peace and found identical results. I will attempt to find an online reference for this.

Here's one red flag: statisticians are mathematicians. Sounds like your friend (or his reference) doesn't have a clear idea of what's going on.

Edit to clarify: not all mathematicians are statisticians, but why not list the specialties of the others allegedly involved? Combinatorists would be okay; maybe to an extent number theorists too.

NialScorva

Don't most schools have a degree called "Mathematics" and another called "Statistics"? I think they were completely seperate departments at Virginia Tech.

Muad'Dib

Yeah, it may be a nit-picking thing on my part, but statistics is one form of applied mathematics and I'm inclined to include them all under the same umbrella. A lot of places will have an "applied mathematics" program distinct from their "mathematics" program, but all of them (pure math, stats, applied math, etc.) take the same basic courses--multivariable calculus, linear algebra, usually differential equations, and so forth. It's just the emphasis and the higher-level coursework that differs.

Probably a better criticism of the original claim is that statisticians wouldn't have admitted failure, they would have given the probability of the patterns occuring by chance (while sharing their modeling assumptions). That kind of number (presumably a very slim probability) would be a nice PR thing for the Bible Code folks, but I haven't seen anything like that running around.

NialScorva

More likely to be nit-picking on my part.

I guess my point is that I know a lot of people who are "computer science", but they have different job titles such as "systems analyst", "software engineer", "software architech", and "scientific programmer" to indicate that while they all work in computer science, their specialties are different and don't necessarily cross over.

Muad'Dib

Hmm, apparently Jeffrey Satinover is an MD with some rather unorthodox views:

This is thoroughly irrelevant to his claims about the Bible Code of course, but it does make me want to verify his claims before I'll take them at face value (which, really, should be done with anyone else).

Hey TheDiddleyMan, which Satinover book was your friend talking about? He seems to have published several.

Edited to add: Looks like it was "Cracking the Bible Code." The reviews on Amazon make it sound like he did in fact talk about "mathematicians and statisticians [sic]", so if there's fault here it's not your friend's. You know, I think my roommate has a copy of it--I'll take a look at it sometime this weekend and let you know what I think.

Muad'Dib

Yeah, would you say that software engineers, systems analysts, and computer scientists have done X? Maybe, I don't know. I wouldn't, but I'm pedantic about those kind of things.

TheDiddleyMan

Well, I looked on the net under "Harvard and Bible Codes" and apparently some people like "David Kahzden" and Harold Gans and others said that the phenomenon of the future being predicted in the bible codes is true. This confuses me even more because I thought that Satinover believed the codes did not predict the future. Anyhow, this may be the same people supposedly being talked about in Satinover. My friend (who I will try to get more info from) made it sound like there were high up mathematicians who support the codes. In the other words, my impression was that no serious scientists really supported the codes, but if my friend is correct, some may support the code. Of course, I suppose that depends on how you define "serious scientists". Personally, I would consider somebody at Yale or Harvard to be "serious", as I understand Yale and Harvard are two of the top Universities in the world.



Kevin