Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

2014-01-02 Thread LizR
In the 1970s, Uri Geller managed to persuade a load of eminent physicists
that he had psychic powers. Physicists assume that you are being honest,
because the penalties for not doing so in science are huge (namely, you
will never be taken seriously again). Geller was a defector in a world of
cooperators, in game-heory terms. He had less success with magicians, of
course, who quickly worked out what he was really doing.


On 3 January 2014 00:21, Alberto G. Corona  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 
>
>> 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.
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Alberto.
>
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Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

2014-01-02 Thread Telmo Menezes
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  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 
>>
>> 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 everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
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>> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
>> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Alberto.
>
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Re: Searching the Internet for evidence of time travelers

2014-01-02 Thread Alberto G. Corona
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 

> 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
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> Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
>



-- 
Alberto.

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