Strong evidence of a structured four-phase system in the Voynich Manuscript

[Urtx13]

Mathematical rigor? The analysis includes entropy metrics, LDA modeling, supervised classification, permutation tests, ablation studies, cross-checking...

Actually, the assortment of tools is one of the things that makes the whole pipeline hard to evaluate for me. From my point of view, mathematical rigor implies using the minimum number of tools and transformations to clearly validate your hypothesis. The fact that there was a need to stack a number of models and analytical tools on top of each other only makes it harder to identify potential problems.

I wonder if cyclical nature of the folios was detected in the past research on topic modeling in the Voynich Manuscript? E.g., You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

You first you say that mathematical rigor is required, and I agree. But then you criticize the pipeline for using too many validation methods?

That’s a contradiction.

This idea that “rigor means using the minimum number of tools” is, respectfully, a misunderstanding of what scientific validation is. Rigor is not minimalism. Rigor means testing your hypothesis from multiple independent angles to see if it holds. Thank God aerospace engineers don't think like you, they actively look for redundancies to ensure robustness!

I could’ve stopped after one successful test. But if I had, academic reviewers would rightly ask:

"Did you cross-validated it? Did you test robustness? Did you use alternative data sources?"

So I did all that. And now, ironically, I’m told that using too many validation layers makes it less credible?

That’s not how science works. A result that survives entropy analysis, LDA structure, supervised classification, permutation tests, ablation, and even transcription shifts is a lot more meaningful than one that depends on a single metric.

Also, to your question: previous LDA studies like the one you linked don’t propose or test for cyclical semantic structure. They don’t link topic distributions to external agronomic or lunar data, and that’s the core novelty of this approach. 

Happy to discuss more when the whole paper is out.