Two things keep being conflated here - discouraging people from becoming solvers in the first place, and discouraging people from publicizing their solution after they have become a solver.
The first may sometimes be successful, and likely thanks to Koen's videos which are reaching a wide range of people. The second is seldom successful, and I would probably say virtually never successful if read as trying to persuade solvers they are wrong and should drop their solution. On the solutions list, to the best of my knowledge only one or two people have dropped their solution...but they replaced it with another they now believed absolutely couldn't be a coincidence.
As to the first, if they may provide helpful insights, then wouldn't they provide much more if they were not prisoners of this powerful confirmation bias? Experience of solvers shows that Voynich solutions are a dead end. The odds of any solution being correct are extremely slim, and once a person is wedded to it, their sole goal becomes defending it and persuading others. They've effectively given up on finding the true solution or getting any closer to it, even if they will never know this.
Irrespective of the utility provided, if we can intervene before a person wastes their time and hopes on a wrong solution and puts their real name on a solution in public, that seems to me to be a good thing. Cheshire's academic credibility has taken a nose dive even if he does not quite perceive it that way. And we've had a couple of solvers recently believing that their solution will be financially life-changing for them.
Not many. I'd say:
The first may sometimes be successful, and likely thanks to Koen's videos which are reaching a wide range of people. The second is seldom successful, and I would probably say virtually never successful if read as trying to persuade solvers they are wrong and should drop their solution. On the solutions list, to the best of my knowledge only one or two people have dropped their solution...but they replaced it with another they now believed absolutely couldn't be a coincidence.
As to the first, if they may provide helpful insights, then wouldn't they provide much more if they were not prisoners of this powerful confirmation bias? Experience of solvers shows that Voynich solutions are a dead end. The odds of any solution being correct are extremely slim, and once a person is wedded to it, their sole goal becomes defending it and persuading others. They've effectively given up on finding the true solution or getting any closer to it, even if they will never know this.
Irrespective of the utility provided, if we can intervene before a person wastes their time and hopes on a wrong solution and puts their real name on a solution in public, that seems to me to be a good thing. Cheshire's academic credibility has taken a nose dive even if he does not quite perceive it that way. And we've had a couple of solvers recently believing that their solution will be financially life-changing for them.
(30-04-2025, 08:57 PM)RobGea wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view. The solutions cover a lot of ground , are there any specific criteria , that are needed for a concept to become a solution ?
Not many. I'd say:
- There has to be a thread on the forum for the solution's discussion.
- There has to be enough information about the solution for it to be discussed. Otherwise, I can only add it to the secondary list where we're not sure what the language/system is. So this presumes the solver has identified the language and translated at least a few words.
- Certainty. The person has to believe they have deciphered it. For example, I wouldn't include dfs346's work mapping Voynichese to various plaintext languages because they are just experiments: he doesn't think he's cracked it with any of them.
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