The Voynich Ninja

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"Jim Handlin will present his deciphering of the Voynich manuscript,..."

I wonder why most of the decipherers rush to present their solution all at once, without any previous consultations with the (experienced) Voynich community. The places are known - Voynich Ninja, mailing list, blogs of Pelling and Bax, plenty of opportunities.

I've wondered about that too, Anton, especially when the "solution" reads like a summation of well-known VMS research.


I'm hoping someone who goes to this talk will summarize it for those of us who aren't able to attend.

Is the VM considered "one of the crown jewels of esoteric lore"?   What does that even mean?

Also apparently he sees it as a mixture of Jewish and Coptic material... better have at least some decent references.

(07-10-2017, 10:46 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I wonder why most of the decipherers rush to present their solution all at once, without any previous consultations with the (experienced) Voynich community. The places are known - Voynich Ninja, mailing list, blogs of Pelling and Bax, plenty of opportunities.

Anton,

this is not difficult to explain.
Some do (but they don't go to the list you presented).
Many don't.

They simply don't recognise the (experienced) Voynich community as such.
Their first target is invariably Ray Clemens.
Nick and myself get our fair share.

From my own experience, once I expose the problems in their 'solutions', invariably they argue that I am wrong, and I cannot know anyway, because I haven't solved it myself.
So I wonder why they asked me in the first place, but never mind that.

So what is going on here?
Here's my amateur psychological analysis.

Any would-be solver believes that he has solved a problem that 100 years before him (her) nobody has been able to solve.
This puts them 'above' all other Voynich enthousiasts, which makes the opinion of such enthousiasts less interesting.

Now they go to Ray Clemens because it is easy enough to find out that he is responsible for the MS.
They come to me because my site figures quite high in any google search.
They invariably like it a lot, but they don't really read it

Many (if not most) of them are nervous that:
1) Someone else finds the solution before them
2) Someone else takes their solution and takes all the praise (and possibly rewards)

This means they prefer to keep everything under wraps and present it all at once.

Yes, I think you are right, that's the case - one's deep belief in that the solution is true, resulting from inability or unwillingness to critically assess it, combined with concern about priority.

Anyway, let me be fair and hope that that is not the case with Mr. Handlin's solution.

However, the announcement as it is made, rather disappoints me. It runs this way:

"...Handlin's solution—if verifiable—is a mind-blowing revelation..." 
So they are not certain in whether this solution is verifiable or not. Now, what's the point in presenting a solution which is not verifiable??

I think they mean 'if it can be verified', ie, if someone would be so kind as to lend them some support?

Well, another reason, could lie perhaps in the way the "friendly community" welcomes new ideas.

(07-10-2017, 10:46 PM)Anton Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I wonder why most of the decipherers rush to present their solution all at once, without any previous consultations with the (experienced) Voynich community. The places are known - Voynich Ninja, mailing list, blogs of Pelling and Bax, plenty of opportunities.

There's a lot of interesting psychology in this...

I've noticed many disappear after presenting their "solutions", without defending the research (without explaining why or how they see what they see) and many don't seem to continue the research after presenting a "solution" (did they have a genuine interest in the manuscript or did they think they saw something no one else has seen and perhaps discover it wasn't as new or as original as they originally assumed?).


If you have an idea that you believe in, really believe in, and others disagree, that's certainly no reason to discontinue the research. It doesn't matter whether people disagree, it matters only that you critically evaluate your work at every step, adjust your ideas if necessary, and soldier on.


The other thing I've noticed, many times, is that some of the "solution" presenters seem to think that all they have to do is provide the germ of a "new idea" (which often isn't new, it's often something that's been asked-and-answered) and that others somehow have the task of doing the actual work of decoding it while the "solver" sits on a throne with a glass of wine and drinks up the glory of having presented the idea. If the VMS were a simple substitution cipher and someone presented a chart of verifiable correspondences, they might get away with doing that, but the VMS obviously is something different, and many of those "ideas" have been tried and abandoned and it's going to take something more than a statement or a simple chart to describe what is happening. Even if a system for the text were discovered, it might take considerable work to unravel it.