Who actually wants the Voynich solved?

[tavie]

Agree with Koen - this is an incredibly common claim. I've never gone back and counted it, but we have had a lot of solvers say this or a similar phrase when their solution is not accepted. There are minor variants of this claim along the lines of us not wanting it to be language X, and us not wanting it to be solved by someone out of the community or be beaten by them. We had one solver claim we would have nothing to do in our lives without this mystery, and that was why we rejected their obvious breakthrough.

It was also a claim made by people who thought incorrectly that they had solved the Zodiac 340 cypher and couldn't understand that their solution was not accepted. The rationale had to be that their critics didn't want someone else to solve it before them, or they didn't even want it solved at all. 

Yet the actual solution was accepted by the Zodiac cypher community quite quickly. 

Confirmation bias is a problem for anyone with a theory but it is absolutely gigantic for anyone who thinks they are solving the Voynich (or another famous mystery like the Zodiac cyphers), possibly because there is an emotional investment created for being the one to make the breakthrough. I think it is even worse for the few that get some form of public traction because there's now also a reputation at stake if they're wrong. 

Solvers focus on their initial seemingly positive results and soon this builds up to a tower of overwhelming obviousness that they must be onto something. It can't be a coincidence. Everything they see backs this up. It is a genuine baffling mystery to them when their theory or solution is criticized. When you see someone attacking something that is obviously right to you, it's human nature to start wondering about their motivations. 

Critics can see how the solution is weighed down by myriad assumptions that have to be true for it to work, and they can see the problems within it. Many are basic and should have been identified by the solver themselves. But I cannot recall any solver proactively listing all the assumptions they are making and the reasons they might be wrong. This is always left to the critics to point out, usually in vain. We had one solver once acknowledge some points but then say something like "but because the solution is right, there must be an explanation out there somewhere, so it really doesn't matter."

There has been well over 100 solutions pre AI. Even though they may be for different languages and systems, they all make the same type of mistakes.