More rigorously testing the hoax hypothesis

[degaskell]

Koen - I think these are exactly the challenges. The variability in particular is a major problem, since even if you did get one person to produce a text long enough for analysis, there is no guarantee that another person would produce a text that looks anything alike it. (The one thing I am relatively comfortable saying is that you're not guaranteed to go insane doing this - the existence of lengthy nonsense texts such as the Codex Seraphinianus seems to disprove that, and IDK, people are weird, man. In interviewing our participants I was struck by how some of them reacted with "this is the most boring thing I have ever done", while others reported enjoying it, like doodling or meditation.)

I suspect the best way out is to think probabilistically. We tried to do this in our experiment by treating text samples as a distribution of values and looking at the degree of overlap between categories; with enough "there is a 32% of seeing this effect, and a 68% chance of seeing this effect," you can start to build up an aggregate picture of which of several options is most likely. But the challenge is how to do this with longer texts, where the sample size is liable to be limited. The computer approach would be to develop some set of generative algorithms thought to be plausible, and then iterate them over a range of plausible parameters values to create a simulated distribution of long texts; but the challenge is how to minimize unknowns enough to say anything persuasive. If robust indicators of meaning or nonmeaning could be identified, of course, that would simplify matters considerably.

People are geared to find meaning, even where there is obviously none (or none should exist). So I'm not surprised that many experimentees have to fail in the task of creating completely meaningless text in the end.

I find the phrase "fail in the task of creating completely meaningless text" fascinating, because from my perspective, the participants didn't fail at all. They wrote text that had no recoverable linguistic meaning, but that did not necessarily mean that it was random, just that any nonrandomness it exhibited did not encode linguistic meaning. Consider the texts "jqvdy fls mcbdkpfkrfbak zzaa", "quodliar sae cauerliar foenibecc", and "the mome raths outgrabe." The first two are equally linguistically meaningless, but differ in randomness; the third is linguistically meaningful, but appears to be nonsense until explained. I think this highlights the distinction between being mathematically random (which the Voynich clearly is not) and being linguistically random (which the Voynich may still be).

It would be interesting to compare the "systems" developed "on the fly" with each other to check whether, and if so in which form, there are similarities. For this purpose, one can of course interview the experimentees.

For background, we collected these data several years ago, and one of my main regrets was not designing in a more comprehensive post-exercise questionnaire for the participants. We did interview them, but analyzing the data raised a lot more questions I wished we had asked!

More anecdotally, however, it seemed to be common to mix and match one or more approaches such as: 1) writing whatever "felt" realistic without thinking very hard about why; 2) informally inventing (or adapting from a known language) a set of morphemes and then using them to construct plausible-sounding words; and 3) copying and modifying previously-invented words to maintain a consistent vocabulary. Were the participants to have invented custom writing systems as well, I expect a fourth category of "what characters looked pretty when juxtaposed" might also have emerged.