Poor guy and interesting story. I don't find that hard to believe at all. I think there's an intelligence paradox: up to a certain level you are harder to fool, but after a certain point you may become so aware of the the scope of our ignorance that outlandish ideas become acceptable again.
A vaccine against this might be the development of strong empirical skills (being good at estimating priors, for example). I think it's possible to be or become very intelligent without developing good empirical skills. I would say your friend made a simple mistake: just because it is likely that our reality is extremely weird does not mean that one specific instance of weirdness is likely. On Thu, Jan 2, 2014 at 11:21 AM, Alberto G. Corona <[email protected]> wrote: > I knew a brilliant, experienced, standard, agnostic, peerreviewed physicist > and sucessful businessman that studied takions: particles with > superluminical speeds, and the possibility of time travel using them. He was > cheated and robbed by a sect of almost analphabet freaks that easily > convinced him that they were aliens teletransported to the Earth using the > technology that he envisioned. That is not an invention. > > > 2014/1/2 Telmo Menezes <[email protected]> >> >> http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.7128 >> >> The Internet is to time travel what smartphones are to UFO sightings: >> in the latter case, the "I didn't have a camera at the time" excuse is >> harder to swallow. >> >> Of course, in both cases we are hypothesising entities which are >> potentially more intelligent than us, so looking for them in the >> context of our own mental models might be flawed (I'm playing devil's >> advocate here -- I believe it to be very unlikely that we are being >> visited by either time travellers or aliens). >> >> Cheers >> Telmo. >> >> -- >> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups >> "Everything List" group. >> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an >> email to [email protected]. >> To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. >> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. >> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. > > > > > -- > Alberto. > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
