Need advice for testing of hypotheses related to the self-citation method

[Jorge_Stolfi]

"It does not follow" is not a valid criticism of any theory... Induction is not deduction. It isn't worthless.

Torsten&Timm's theory (TTT) is "the VMS is a hoax".  Their arguments are (A) the VMS has certain repetition patterns that are not seen in a set of other texts they examined, and ( B) they devised a probabilistic generator whose output is like Voynichese according to some statistics, including similar repetition patterns.

Pointing out that A&B does not imply TTT is a perfectly valid criticism of the TTT.

If you prefer in Bayes:

Code:

                                  Prob(A&B|TTT) * Prob(TTT) Prob(TTT|A&B) = ------------------------------------------------------------                   Prob(A&B|TTT)*Prob(TTT) + Prob(A&B|not TTT)*Prob(not TTT)       

where Prob(TTT) is the a priori probability of the VMS being a hoax. My probability of that is less than 0.0001 (0.01%).

If A is true then B is true too, because the kind of repetitions that were detected are such that the SCM (or many other methods) can generate them.  So A&B in in fact equivalent to A.

The factor Prob(A&B|TTT) is therefore Prob(A|TTT), the probability that a hoax text will have the kind of repetitions that they detected.  Not all hoax texts will have them. But let's be generous and say that Prob(A|TTT) = 0.5. 

The term Prob(A&B|not TTT) is therefore Prob(A|not TTT), the probability that a non-hoax text will have the kind of repetitions that they detected.  Let's be pessimistic and say that it is 0.01 (1%).  Then

Code:

                        0.5 * 0.0001              0.00005 Prob(TTT|A&B) = ----------------------------- =~ ----------- = 0.005 = 0.5%                 0.5 * 0.0001 + 0.01 * 0.9999       0.01

Said more simply: if one does not believe a priori that the VMS is a hoax, knowing A and B will not convince them.