The Voynich Ninja

(12-12-2021, 02:12 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. I was quite pleased that he was illuminating his method  

I don't see what light this has shed on his methods, other than to confirm he showed most if not all of the symptoms you and I considered in your thread.  The not-having-read-existing-material point is unsurprising since 3 weeks would not have been enough to do so.  And we already knew how he identified words.  Ben Cartlidge's quote in May 2019 rather summed it up:  " C. hasn't constructed a systematic grammar of a language: he's taken an etymological dictionary and launched himself at anything he could find."

Granted, I feel rather less tolerant (and far more scathing) towards Cheshire than I would be for all the other theorists, because as an academic with a PhD, he has less excuse to follow such a sloppy approach. 

(12-12-2021, 04:00 PM)Mark Knowles Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The statistical properties of the text, something Gerard should have studied even if for understandable reasons he did not want to be biased by other theories.

Probably going to be controversial now but I just don't have any patience with this approach.  I know it's quite common to see people new to Voynich actually boasting about how they aren't reading any of the pre-existing material, whether it's observations about the statistical properties, hypotheses about them, or any of the past theories.  I doubt anyone has read it all, for good reasons.  But not to read any of it seems utterly bizarre to me.

In no other field of research do you start, let alone make any discoveries, by deciding not to read any of the existing literature.  All that work out there, whether it is categorization of Voynichese's seemingly endless bizarre statistical properties, or previous "solutions" that reveal pitfalls to avoid...the idea you should not only avoid looking at any of it but also turn that into virtue is just plain absurd.  It inadvertently celebrates ignorance but likely is revealing of a dismissive attitude to others and their ability to have their own original, insightful thoughts.  And yet Cheshire isn't a 17 year old schoolkid who thinks he's got original thoughts no one else has had and then gets a shock when he arrives at university.  He's an experienced academic who presumably did not pass his degrees by refusing to read anything others wrote.  And when you combine it with his "solution" only taking 3 weeks to complete, that says it all.  3 weeks isn't enough time to read the existing work on Voynichese, let alone reproduce it yourself from scratch, let alone solve it. 

Secondly, it's kind of a self-own.  I doubt he realizes this but he's basically admitting that he doesn't trust his brain to critically examine the work of others without being "polluted" by their assumptions and conclusions.  If he can't question others' conclusions and spot their hidden premises or assumptions, how is he going to play that role against himself?  How is he going to be his own sceptic, fight against confirmation bias, and ensure his methodology is robust?  The answer seems to be that he didn't do any of that, and his methodology is incredibly sloppy and "unacademic".

Lastly, even if we concede the danger of pollution (which I don't), why not do your reading after your uniquely-open tabula rasa mind has worked out the solution?  Once the mystery was unlocked, he was at perfect liberty to go read existing works.  If he'd done that, he would have learned about the bizarre Voynichese properties and could have tested his system against them.  If he'd looked at any of that particular year's crop of solutions, he could have seen that the mistakes they made were also inherent in his system.  I suspect at that point he was already drowning in confirmation bias and too deep in his fantasy of having pulled the sword from the stone to change his mind, but there was the opportunity. At the very least, he would have found out the commonly accepted dating range for the manuscript and been able to correct his work pre-publication.  And perhaps even stop calling them "portfolios".

I think it's very telling he avoided looking at existing work.  I suspect it shares the same cause as his never once asking himself during those three weeks "If it was this quick and easy, why hasn't anyone done it before?"  As you say, Mark, his methods are hardly innovative.  Yet it never seemed to occur to him that anyone else would have tried counting the characters to identify vowels, and looking in dictionaries of Latin (and its daughter languages) for similar words. 

We don't get any evidence of his asking himself these questions, nor do we learn anything positive about his methodology for reducing confirmation bias. Instead we get all this nonsense about a "certain type of brain" being required to read the manuscript.  

Well, isn't that the motto these days. 'Go for your dream; no matter what others may say.' So, he's doing his thing. That's *his* problem - mostly. When it passes the VMs Botanical interpretation test, let me know.

If a solution is proposed, that solution has a methodology of derivation. With that methodology provided, it can be applied to a randomly selected VMs botanical folio. The results of the interpretations from other independent investigators should be substantially similar. When that happens, like I said, let me know.

That's the difference between the linguistic and illustrative aspects of VMs investigation. The illustrative aspects have their artistic and historical counterparts. 'Coincidently' much of this data fits within the C-14 dates The linguistic aspects have their vords, and glyphs, and statistics. Is it possible that the two sides are connected in the VMs; that the illustrations were intended to provide some information about the language? A cursory examination of VMs White Aries does not reveal its true depth. Look for information where information is provided. There is a visual code. It's called heraldry. Used to be popular (C-14) and can be historically verified.

Hey, just got a notification regarding the Nahuatl interpretation. Are they giving up on that one? I doubt it.

(12-12-2021, 08:08 PM)tavie Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Granted, I feel rather less tolerant (and far more scathing) towards Cheshire than I would be for all the other theorists, because as an academic with a PhD, he has less excuse to follow such a sloppy approach.

Yes, one could simply state that Cheshire has not contributed anything of value to Voynich research and probably will not in the future. For someone like me, who constantly questions his own thoughts about the solution of the Voynich mystery, someone like Cheshire is hardly imaginable as a serious VMS researcher. In the shortest time, and free of any previous knowledge, a crude theory was simply put together which pushes the existing knowledge of the professional world (especially linguists) aside. One may expect more from an academic.

This is not, of course, an assessment of Cheshire as a person. He also has every right in the world to do his thing, regardless of what others think.

He’s a crank. A crank is someone who clings tightly to an idea that is demonstrably wrong or unhelpful. The interesting thing is, cranks tend to have average mental health and intelligence, and are usually quite reasonable people. With one very marked exception.

Clearly we can dismiss his work as entirely unsubstantiated. The real problem is that he formats these papers as if they were set by a publisher, giving the impression of peer-review and professionalism where there is none. Each of his papers presumes that the one before it is fact, even though all are entirely based on nothing but his own previous work. When you follow the trail back to the original piece, it is easy to see how the whole house of cards can be blown over by simply asking him (as I did) to demonstrate his methodology using logic that ISN'T circular or based on unsupported assumptions. He can't do it, and has nothing to fall back on except anger and offense.

It's one thing to post a blog promoting a theory...it is quite another to attempt to fool the reading public by formatting your work as if it were from a peer-reviewed journal (and as we all know, even that isn't necessarily trustworthy!). He has joined numerous medieval, linguistic, and digital-humanities listservs in order to promote his work in defiance of accepted norms of professional behavior and after multiple cease-and-desist notices from listserv administrators. He has also tried at times to use his own nickname for the VMS in papers submitted for peer review instead of citing it by shelfmark, again as a way of sneaking past peer review. It didn't work. He really just needs to give it up.

Exactly. It is not the fact that he is a misled Voynich theorist that is so offensive, there are many of those and it seems like being misled by the sphinx is part of the human condition. It are his unethical practices I find unacceptable. It started back in 2017, when he mailed me that I was "among a number of scholars worldwide, chosen to receive a new academic paper that may be of interest to your field of study." This academic paper was "published" by a site he had built himself.

I then sent him a detailed and polite explanation on why his theory didn't make sense (I even included some graphs). His reply says it all: "I feel bad that you have invested so much time and effort, as I am entirely certain the solution is correct."

Cheshire's apparent inability to accept constructive criticism is regrettable. But in the meantime his theories have exactly the status they deserve among experts. So some things are clearing up by themselves. What annoys me is, for example, the inappropriate treatment of Cheshire's work in the German Wikipedia. In my opinion, a marginal note for the sake of completeness is sufficient here. Everything else is unnecessary "data garbage". In other words, the attention given to Cheshire's work should be in proportion to its quality.

(13-12-2021, 02:20 PM)LisaFaginDavis Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.He has joined numerous medieval, linguistic, and digital-humanities listservs in order to promote his work in defiance of accepted norms of professional behavior and after multiple cease-and-desist notices from listserv administrators. He has also tried at times to use his own nickname for the VMS in papers submitted for peer review instead of citing it by shelfmark, again as a way of sneaking past peer review. It didn't work.

I didn't know that. He has really gone above and beyond to promote his theory, against his protestations that he has no interest in publicity.

I really struggle to find anything positive to say about Cheshire-style Voynich theories these days. If someone can say something genuinely interesting about one tiny detail, I'm delighted, almost ecstatic: but big, brutally wrong theories, carved from vapour? What words could possibly express my disdain?

Finally I had a good experience with the German Wikipedia. After several attempts I succeeded in shortening the Cheshire section in the article about the VMS. The section was completely overlong and gave the theses an importance that they simply do not deserve. Actually, in my opinion, Cheshire should not be mentioned in Wikipedia at all (at most a short note ), but one is already satisfied with small successes.