geoffreycaveney > 20-09-2020, 02:57 PM
geoffreycaveney > 20-09-2020, 03:22 PM
Emma May Smith > 20-09-2020, 04:13 PM
(20-09-2020, 03:22 PM)geoffreycaveney Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I have one more thing to say: I need to apologize to Emma for the negative comment I made in passing in my long reply to RenegadeHealer in this thread yesterday, as well as for the similar sarcastic comment in my reply to Emma in the Arabic thread. We all have our own opinions and approaches and methods that we do or don't think are productive ways to analyze the Voynich ms text. No one is obligated to be interested in approaches or methods that they don't think are productive. I should not presume that others should find any of my observations or ideas interesting. That is up to each of us to decide as individuals. I apologize to Emma for presuming otherwise and for singling her out for it.
Geoffrey
RenegadeHealer > 20-09-2020, 04:45 PM
geoffreycaveney > 20-09-2020, 05:27 PM
(20-09-2020, 04:45 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.Hi Geoffrey. I think I understand better what you're trying to do, and who your audience is. Correct me if I'm wrong, but your intention is largely Promethian: you'd like to take a body of specialized knowledge, by and for specialists, and create something that allows laypeople to use and apply that knowledge. On the one hand, I can't not respect that, because this is basically what I do for a living. People who've hired me present me their problems, I translate these into technical terms, manipulate these terms logically to determine a course of action, and then translate these available courses of action back into plain English for the client. During all of this, I have to be unfailingly reassuring to this layperson who has hired me as an expert. I have to reassure him that I understand why this problem is important enough to motivate him hiring me. (In other words, I have to validate his concerns.) I have to reassure him that I have the expertise to understand and solve his problem. And finally, I have to reassure him that I understand what his end goal is, that is, what sort of outcome he would consider an acceptable solution. Falter at any of these steps, and I run the risk of the client being profoundly dissatisfied with my services.
I've found this a very transferrable skill; in my free time, I like to keep up with the work of the heavyweights in Voynich Studies, and I like to try to see if I can interpret their scientific findings in layman's terms. This is to make sure that I understand what they're saying, as well as helping other laypeople understand.
The difference is, on my day job, the Promethian fire I'm carrying down the mountain is my own specialized knowledge, not someone else's. As I have an expert's level of knowledge in none of the areas immediately relevant to the VMs, I'm not in a position to determine if my interpretations of this information are accurate, helpful, or even welcome. What this means in practical terms is, if an expert here gives me feedback on my interpretation of their work, then as far as I'm concerned, that's the last word. I'm not really in any position to argue with it. And so, when an expert here has given me the gift of replying to a nobody like me at all, I always try to make it very clear that I recognize and defer to their expertise, and am only trying to be playful and helpful, not challenge them.
I'll leave you with one other thought. It may or may not apply to you, so feel free to ignore it if it doesn't. I'm naturally a very emotionally intense — and sensitive — individual. But I'm not naturally good at reading people. Many times I've approached groups of people who are into something I'm into, and my excitement (coupled with my articulate and longwinded verbal style) has been misinterpreted as a lack of appropriate humility. People have been quick to call Dunning-Kruger on me: "He does not know what he does not know." This hurts, because this was not at all what I intended. Things got better when I started asking myself, "What could I do that still feels like 'my style', but is less likely to accidentally give this impression?" All any of us want is to be accepted, and to be effectual and relevant. And as you said, we all bring different things to the table.
Koen G > 20-09-2020, 06:13 PM
RenegadeHealer > 20-09-2020, 06:51 PM
geoffreycaveney > 20-09-2020, 08:57 PM
(20-09-2020, 06:13 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.I found it interesting that you had turned it into a readable format, but I do not endorse using this as the basis for a theory in the way that you might. If I had decided to add two or three more or fewer transformations, your result would have looked completely different. Moreover, this distracts from the actual problems of statistics we are still facing with the VM.
Koen G > 20-09-2020, 11:01 PM
geoffreycaveney > 20-09-2020, 11:36 PM
(20-09-2020, 11:01 PM)Koen G Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.(20-09-2020, 06:51 PM)RenegadeHealer Wrote: You are not allowed to view links. Register or Login to view.The VMs scene is a bit of a Wild West or pirates' cove, where there's no clear set rules, or even objectives.
Nonsense, our objectives are very clear! To solve the Voynich manuscript