Thank you for your thoughtful reply; although, as will be evident, I'm not quite sure I actually got the point across.

(But why wouldn't they as well, if they're "smart"?)

It's not clear that willingness to listen to strange-sounding claims exhibits correlation with instrumental rationality,

I didn't realize at all that by "smart" you meant "instrumentally rational"; I was thinking rather more literally in terms of IQ. And I would indeed expect IQ to correlate positively with what you might call openness. More precisely, although I would expect openness to be only weak evidence of high IQ, I would expect high IQ to be more significant evidence of openness.

People who are willing to listen to strange-sounding claims statistically end up hanging out with UFO conspiracy theorists, New Age people, etc...

Why can't they just read the darn sequences and pick up on the fact that these people are worth listening to?

See my remarks above.

The point of my comment was that reading his writings reveals a huge difference between Eliezer and UFO conspiracy theorists, a difference that should be more than noticeable to anyone with an IQ high enough to be in graduate school in mathematics. Yes, of course, if all you know about a person is that they make strange claims, then you should by default assume they're a UFO/New Age type. But I submit that the fact that Eliezer has written things like these decisively entitles him to a pass on that particular inference, and anyone who doesn't grant it to him just isn't very discriminating.