[Interview] An interview with Stephen Bax

[nickpelling]

Naturally, I'm deeply honoured that Bax felt bothered enough about my long-standing criticisms of his Voynich theory, his decoding methodology, and his internally weak arguments that he would use this video as a platform to direct a series of close-to-libelous personal attacks in my direction.

However, if he had spent even 10% of the time he invested in trying to shoot the messenger in reflecting on the actual problems I highlighted, he might well instead have concluded that building his theory on top of (a) page-initial + gallows-initial words and (b) other people's highly interpretative herbal identifications are two central strategic mistakes from which his theorizing could never recover, not in 10 years or even 100 years.

Also somewhat galling was Bax's eagerness to denigrate Currier's work as linguistically naive (i.e. that differences could be explained away as scribal variations), and even to disparage the usefulness of computer-aided statistical analysis in general (that to be useful it "needs to be grounded in linguistics", I think he said). Any theory that requires such basic pillars of research to be undermined is close to a religion, i.e. one that places faith over rationality.