New Post: "I Do Listen to the Experts. Do YOU?"

[proto57]

It is clear that you are trying to be very selective about when you listen to people you call experts and when you don't. The manuscript being "geninue", or not, is a dating conclusion. If you respect these people's opinions you should listen to their resounding conclusion that the Voynich is not a modern forgery and not downplay or ignore that opinion.

So your contention is that we must accept every shred of the opinions of others, or discard it all, and there is no in between? I not only strongly disagree, but can probably cite countless examples of when selective use of expert opinion is done, and even required, to buttress 1420 genuine. And it is you who have decided that the dating conclusions are also genuine conclusions? Then explain how you reject Charles Singer's verdict here, and don't accept his entire theory?

Another allegory springs to mind: Those people who thought they saw the lights of UFO's on a hill somewhere. Well, it can be shown they DID see lights, but it turns out they were a mirage from distant cars. We can therefore accept their observation, while throwing out their conclusion. That is valid, and done all the time. In this case the allegorical comparison would be in your proving they never saw those lights. I, on the other hand, listen to the observation, judge it on its merits or lack of them, and come to my own conclusion as to what it means.

The contradictions between the different datings does not imply your theory is true. I think that many or most of the people that you list can hardly be considered "experts" when it comes to dating as I said a long time ago. Was "Newbold" really an expert? In addition the difficulties in dating an object like the Voynich in part account for the various datings.

You have sort of "switched gears" here, and now reintroduced another argument for the disregarding of experts: Is this one or that one "enough" of an expert, or the right type of expertise, or experienced enough, or had enough familiarity with the Voynich, etc.. Which is fine, really, but not pertinent to the point of my accepting their dating, and yet coming to different conclusions as to what their disparity of opinion tells us.

I also note you went to the "low hanging fruit" of the case of poor Romaine Newbold, and avoid the less vulnerable reputations of Panofsky, O'Neil, Singer, and so on. But I would say that, despite his being led astray by various provably and proven incorrect ideas about the Voynich, he did have a respectable reputation before that, if a somewhat tarnished on after his Voynich fiasco.

We can always find some nugget of gold in even the worst collection of clap trap. I don't agree with you, I mean, that it must be all or nothing, when it comes to anyone's opinion. One risks "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" if we do.

But