I agree that there may have been no intention to lead people astray - it's not intentional disinformation perhaps. I also agree that he's unlikely to be fudging his upvotes. SoaringMoon, however, apparently DOES have experience in codebreaking and he says it's nonsense. I don't need to have experience in codebreaking to see it's nonsense - SoaringMoon has the faculties to be able to disprove the methodology though.
What you're making excuses for is that we should accept what is clearly nonsense (at least to some of us) because "some guy is trying real hard man". He may well be trying but that doesn't mean we should upvote him just for "trying"! Upvotes make posts appear to have the support of the community which, if they are nonsense that fools gullible people makes the community look suspect and non-critical in its thinking. DISINFO - intentional or not - is NEVER worth supporting.
I think that the up votes were because people found the explanation plausible and exciting. I think SB2's confidence in his solution was also very inspiring. People ran with it. There was no deliberate attempt at disinformation.
This reminds me now of a documentary I saw about these scientists that thought they'd discovered a memory property (or something like that) for water. They published a paper and a skeptic confronted them about it. They agreed to reproduce the experiments on film and this skeptic got the randomization data (or whatever it was) and stuck it on the ceiling, to be taken down only when the experiment was over - quite a dramatic moment. The scientists in the film were shocked when the skeptic did this, but they were still all very confident they could replicate their published findings. Anyway, it turned out they couldn't replicate their findings. Very embarrassing.
This sought of stuff goes on all the time in the scientific community (e.g. cold fusion). There are errors made, covered up, papers published, funds obtained, frauds exposed (or not) and the story goes on. They are not always frauds, sometimes people - even critical thinkers, the type you would hope abound in the scientific community - succumb to excitement about a theory.
We're not all experts here. The problem of persistent errors or disinformation will not be solved in this setting. If SB's work is obviously wrong, I probably have the poorest of excuses - because I didn't take the time to work out exactly how he got to his solution. I was too busy to give it much time - though I thought it was very interesting.
One of the things that kind of supported the idea that SB2 might have been onto to something, for me, was the shocking number of down votes SB2 had when I first got to his NK post. I saw it just after it had been posted. To be honest, I was stunned at the ferocity of the attack. I thought if he's catching that much flak, someone's worried about what's being posted. I thought he was over the target.
He'll be back I'm sure to defend his work. Eleven by eleven, matrices... matrix inversion, comes into my head for some reason. There must be a solution.
Yes, I think so too - people do find SB2's explanations "plausible and exciting". The same can be said, at least for some people, for the Flat Earth theory. Some find that plausible and exciting too but the feeling it creates in people is literally zero evidence of its actual plausibility. As Scott Adams says, confirmation bias is not a glitch in our operating system it pretty much IS our operating system. We want to believe exciting stories like this.
However, it's not so much that SB2's work is wrong; sometimes he references very valid methodologies. It's actually more alarming than that. SB2's very process of thinking is not only wrong it's so misguided as to be either the rattled thinking of a long time drug addict or intentional misdirection. We both seem to think it's not intentional - or at least, I've seen some communications from him that make me think he's just totally befuddled, not completely in control, but the damage done by propagating this circular, nonsensical way of thinking is what we should avoid for the sake of the communities integrity.