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Annoyance comments on Misleading the witness - Less Wrong
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Wrong. Tricksters rely on people making stupid assumptions and failing to check assertions. People with a lot of brainpower can do those things just as easily as people without.
Physicists asked to evaluate paranormal claims do very poorly, yet they are clearly very brainy. It takes more than just brains to be intelligent - you have to use the brains properly.
If I had a dollar for every brainy person who'd been gulled because they thought they were "too smart" to require being skeptical...
Reference, please. I defy the implied claim that "Physicists asked to evaluate paranormal claims do worse than the average person". I bet 6:1 against this.
and if I had a dollar for every average idiot who sleepwalked straight into an obvious scam I would make a lot more money.
Project Alpha by James Randi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha
Scientists tend to be trusting and naive, since neither nature nor their peers are prone to lying. That's why magicians make such great skeptics -- their profession is nothing but lying!
Those sets are not disjoint.
I define "average idiot" to be disjoint from "brainy person". Does that sound reasonable?
Of course, I am sure that there are some very clever people who sleepwalked straight into a really obvious scam without even questioning it, but I am making the empirical claim that this doesn't happen as much as it does for people of below average intelligence.