Elephant in the Room Solution Considerations

[eggyk]

I am grateful for the engagements made so far, however. I just feel that it is best not to take more of their time since I have already shared what I intended for whatever it is worth, and if I find more things to say I will just share it in a way that does not take time from this forum. I realize these exchanges themselves are also taking others' time, so hopefully I won't need to write more on this matter and it stops with this post.

Hi Behrooz, I looked through much of this thread and I personally think that one of the reasons you may not be gathering as much traction or discussion for your ideas is that they are all posted in this thread, instead of their own thread within their respective forum areas. I would imagine that some users gravitate more to the area they are most familiar with, such as provenance and history, imagery, or astronomy + astronomy. Therefore some very knowledgeable forum goers likely haven't had the opportunity to answer your posts within a space dedicated to a single topic (as opposed to on page 18 of a 21 page multi-topic thread). 

Your ideas may be worth persuing, or they may not be. Each of them deserves its own place to stand up to or fall to peer review. Personally I would be more likely to do such peer review in the seperate areas of the forum. Some days i just want to look at imagery, some days i just want to look at text analysis, you know? 

I find it helpful to apply to my study of the VM what we call in sociology the “phenomenological” approach. Even though that term crosses disciplinary boundaries for good reasons, in sociology we use it to refer to a procedure whereby we study something inductively, in each step always questioning not just what we are studying, but also our own notions of it that we have taken for granted. So, in each step, we ask, even regarding obvious terms or notions, “what do you mean by that?”

Does the VM exist? What is it? Why is it? How did it (and our efforts in knowing it, or not) come about historically?

Now, in terms of a response to your post near the beginning of this thread, I actually agree with the general concept of what you were saying there. I find this to be an important factor in the potential understanding of the VMS, namely the need to constantly re-check and re-verify the working assumptions of the research on an ongoing basis. If we are currently taking something for granted that we shouldn't, it could be the difference between success and failure. The only way to prevent that is to go back down to first principles, questioning all of our axioms regarding the VMS, no matter how "obvious" they may seem. 

Unfortunately, doing so is genuinely frustrating to those who have worked on this, and understandably so. Having someone new come tell you "hey, that thing you're doing in your field of expertise may be fundamentally wrong!" is frustrating at best and offensive at worst. If this is to be done, it needs to be done the right way and with caution, as I learnt very recently myself here: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.

But I also wish to share a note regarding the issue of length, or wall, of a post, that has been raised. I must say that I have been puzzled by that reaction at the length of my two posts, or its content, which I thought were written accessibly.

Your writing style is who you are and I think that it's fine (even if long-winded   ) . However, in a moving thread such as this where the subject drifts over time, it becomes difficult to follow.  Even though each individual post is generally followable, newcomers to the thread have to navigate pages of long posts, each discussing something different. If someone was interested in the text near the pleiades being "Botrus", could you honestly tell me without looking which pages of this thread are relevant, and which are not?

I genuinely think that your post sizes are entirely appropriate if the subject is well defined. That way everything in the post continues to be firmly on a specific topic and is then more informative and easy to discuss.

In any case, don't feel like what you are saying has no value. If it had no value at all, we wouldn't be on page 21.