I think my first post about the two sets of plates was this one from 2017:
https://www.lettervii.com/2017/02/whatever-happened-to-golden-plates.html
Nine years later, the concept that Joseph Smith translated two entirely different sets of plates has become obvious to most Latter-day Saints. People can read D&C 9 and 10 and see it for themselves. They can consider the discrepancy between what Joseph Smith and Brigham Young said about the final disposition of the plates, etc.
I've heard about it from multiple sources, some of whom "discovered" it from the BYU Studies article.
https://www.bookofmormoncentralamerica.com/2026/01/two-sets-of-plates-enters-mainstream.html
This is all awesome because Latter-day Saints are returning to our roots. We no longer have the cognitive dissonance that arose when certain LDS scholars claimed that Joseph and Oliver misled everyone about the New York Cumorah.
One common question is, why did the Book of Mormon and Church History "experts" figure this out a long time ago.
That's a longer discussion than we'll cover in this post, but it is useful to consider the difference between developing expertise in "kind" and "wicked" environments. In this context, "wicked" is a term of art for environments and domains that are complex and changing, like much human activity.
Naturally, the study of history is more of a "wicked" environment than a "kind" environment.
I reposted a blog on this topic with additional material here:
https://lds-psychology.blogspot.com/2026/05/expertise-in-kind-vs-wicked-environments.html
The concept is set out in David Epstein's book Range, as mentioned in that post.
An excerpt from that blog helps explain the problem with LDS scholars generally and specifically those who promoted M2C (the Mesoamerican/two-Cumorahs theory).
Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.
Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.
As a non-specialist, it was relatively easy for me to abandon the broken M2C model that I had accepted by default for decades.
But for certain LDS scholars who are "specialists" in Book of Mormon studies, their experience made them more and more confident because they simply omitted, ignored and even in some cases censored important information that "did not fit their framework."
