[Talk] Jim Handlin Woodstock Nov. 4

[-JKP-]

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.