Voynich Decoded

[tavie]

...how really the odds are massively against any solution being correct, because there is is this trap in the Voynich that causes people to believe they have solved it when they haven't.

Well said tavie, but I'd have to disagree with that part of your response. I mean did you have a particular Voynich-specific "trap" in mind?  I think the phenomenon you are referring to is in the type of person who gets convinced that their solution is correct and not in the puzzle itself . That seems to be the case with any celebrated unsolved cipher or mystery. (It was certainly so with the Zodiac Z340; One well known and orherwise competent researcher was absolutely convinced he had solved it when it was embrassingly obvious he had not.) Most sensible people realize that when such a problem is correctly solved, the correctness of the  solution is blatantly obvious and compelling -- problems where the solver has to actually convince the world that they are correct are pretty rare. But there are always some people who cannot avoid the self-delusion that their solution is somehow special despite it being obvious to everyone else that it's not.

No - we had another post about this somewhere - I think something with Mark.  It's just a convenient phrase. I don't think at all that Solveritis is unique to the Voynich.  As you said, it was seen for the Zodiac 340 and there are people out there who still insist their solution was correct, despite it being inferior in all the key metrics to the actual solution.  And it was seen with Linear B last century, and with Linear A now.  And also I believe with Fermat's Last Theorem, including people who had little mathematical training.  And the Dorabella cypher, etc.

As Koen says, I do think the Solveritis phenomenon is more prevalent for the Voynich, at least for the moment, because the manuscript is more accessible.