The Critics' Invalid Arguments against WRR

The main line of attack of the critics against the WRR paper was to demonstrate that it is possible to force a similar result in War and Peace if one rigs ("cooks") the data using the invalid method of "finding first and explaining later". Specifically, the critics' paper did so mainly by choosing to include in their 'experiment' only those appellations (names) for each Rabbi that best fit the text. They openly cheated in order to try to not-so-subtlely accuse WRR of secretly cheating.

To elaborate, most Rabbis on the list have several names by which they were known. For example, "Rabbi Moshe" and "The Rambam" are both valid appellations for the same personality. The critics' trick was to "find first": to look for these appellations - and some similar ones that they invented - in War and Peace, before officially beginning. With knowledge of what was found, they chose to include in the 'experiment' only those appellations for this Rabbi that have ELS's in somewhat close proximity to his appropriate birth/death date ELS's in War and Peace. Here is the "explain later" part: they then offered rationalizations as to why each appellation was chosen - using invented linguistic or historic arguments. They even tried to argue that their appellations were equally valid to those chosen by the expert in Rabbinical bibliography used by WRR, Professor Shlomo Zalman Havlin, from the faculty of Information Studies and Bibliography at Bar Ilan University. By their manipulations, the result improves slightly for this Rabbi in War and Peace.

By doing this repeatedly for the entire Rabbi list, the overall result is extremely impressive - but of course invalid because of the way it was done. And their implied conclusion is that WRR must have used similar tricks in the Torah.

It is actually quite interesting that this was the only way available to the critics to explain WRR's extraordinary result. (Many other lesser arguments were advanced, which I will briefly mention later).

Details of all of the critics' points are discussed on Doron Witztum's web site (see links at the end of this site's main page). The more of these one absorbs, the more clear it is that the WRR work was legitimate and extraordinary.

I'll summarize one other key point below, which actually invalidates the above accusation of "cooking".

In addition to the War and Peace tricks, the critics made a supposed duplication of the WRR work in Genesis itself. As part of this effort, they hired an independent bibliographic expert to create an entirely new list of appellations, without his seeing the original list. But the critics' methods of using this data in their 'duplication', which failed to yield evidence of codes, included several questionable or downright incorrect aspects.

When Doron Witztum corrected these methods, a proper duplication of WRR resulted: one in which all of the original WRR methods were retained, and the one aspect most questioned - the appellation list - was replaced with the critics' consultant's own list.

The result was a high significance completely in line with the original WRR result. Details of this are at http://www.torahcodes.co.il/emanuel/eman_hb.htm .

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