Technical Details Raised by the Critics

There are many lesser issues raised by the critics that tend to obscure what really matters. However, for the thorough observer, these can actually add confidence in the WRR and later results, once the flaws in those lesser issues become apparent. The critics' own paper in Statistical Science admits that these procedural or mathematical aspects that they raise do not make or break the WRR result. In their own words, after discussing several of these aspects, they state:

Serious as these problems might be, we cannot establish that they constitute an adequate "explanation" of WRR's result. For the sake of the argument, we are prepared to join them in ... concluding "something interesting is going on". Where we differ is in what we believe that "something" is.

(They then go on to "cook" the data for War and Peace, implying that this must have been used in the Torah - we refuted this earlier). They also raise other possibilities for various ways that the WRR experiment could have been "tuned".

Doron Witztum's subsequent arguments and research not only refute the "serious problems" and the charge of tuning, but also raise important questions about the critics' own methodology.

In addition to all of this, some overriding facts remain:

If there had been improper tuning of WRR methods, those same methods would not be succeeding in all of the newer research.
It can be seen in all of the research that there are in fact differences in results if one uses the various alternatives proposed by the critics (in their paper and subsequently). But in fact, many of these alternatives actually improve the significance! Even if a result degrades by a factor of 10 or even 100 for an individual experiment, this usually does not change the conclusion for that experiment, and certainly not for the accumulated result of all the work presented here.
Whether the accumulated result is 1 in a billion billion or 1 in a trillion trillion is really immaterial.

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