(01-07-2026, 10:19 AM)Bernd Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.If you are approaching a problem with the mindset to 'prove' your theory, you are already a bad scientist.
That is a naive view of how science is done. In reality, science usually advances only when a scientist notices some peculiar pattern in some data, invents a theory to explain it,
becomes convinced that it is likely to be true, and works hard to find evidence that can convince others of it. That is, conviction usually comes
before the proof, not after it.
And that must be so, because a scientist almost never stumbles on the categorical evidence right at the start. Without conviction that the theory is very likely true, one would not put any effort into looking for such evidence. One would probably mutter just "that is curious" and then swipe at the phone to check the lunch's menu.
Before one gets evidence that will convince others, one must often endure the critics who say that the theory "seems too unlikely" or "to far-fetched", dare to disagree publicly with the "consensus of the experts" (which is never good for one's career), devise exculpatory explanations for all the evidence that seems to refute the claim (or just put aside that evidence, to be tackled later), etc. If the theory turns out to be wrong, that work and attrition would have been wasted -- but that risk is an unavoidable feature of the job.
It has been claimed that one should not assume any theory while doing research, in order to avoid unconscious bias. That would be nice, but it is not a viable option. There are always infinitely many statistics one could do or experiments one could run, but the vast majority will not produce any useful information. One must have a theory in order to choose the experiment or statistics.
As Popper described, the "scientific method" in a nutshell is:
first formulate a theory,
then perform the simplest experiment you can that would most effectively decide between that theory and its alternatives. That is not just a good observation, but also good advice.
In fact, that ideal "agnostic research" is outright impossible. When one chooses to do a particular statistic or simulation on the VMS, one is automatically and implicitly making certain assumptions about its nature, and therefore about its origin. When one runs statistics on a transcription file like Rene's, one is assuming that the all 100'000 glyph occurrences are instances of a small set of glyph types, and only the type of each glyph (as guessed by the transcriber) is meaningful, while the detailed shape is irrelevant -- as well as the tilt and curvature of the baselines, the shade of the ink, etc.. When one tries to match the plant illustrations to actual plants, one is assuming that the drawings are at least partly realistic (and maybe also assuming that the colors are original). When you choose to tabulate word pairs across line breaks, you are implicitly assuming that the draft was written (not just copied to vellum) from left to right, and that the Scribe respected the line breaks of the Author. And so on.
Scientific research stops being science and turns into pseudoscience only when one keeps believing that one's theory is likely in spite of overwhelming evidence that it is wrong. Or, worse, when one realizes that the theory is wrong, but still pretends to believe in it because that sells books or gets more views on YouTube. Then it is no longer just pseudoscience but outright fraud.
No matter how simple the solution to the VM will turn out to be, chances are that proving that the solution is correct will require a lot of work, after the initial announcement -- and that work will get done only by someone who is convinced to be on the right track,
before he gets the proof.
The point is: don't be quick to scoff "pseudoscience" at a proposed solution just because the guy is trying to prove a theory that still has no convincing proof, or even has some evidence against it. That is probably what the correct solution will look like at first...
All the best, --stolfi