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Kenny comments on Above-Average AI Scientists - Less Wrong
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Kary Mullis denied that AIDS is caused by HIV. I found these claims of his plausible after first reading his book "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field". I'm wary to too easily dismiss conspiracy theories from intelligent people; take the anti-salt science reversal as a recently widely-discussed example.
That's what "AIDS denier" generally means.
Keep in mind that more intelligent people are more likely to be clever arguers than unintelligent people, so their non-mainstream views will tend to sound more convincing. How convincing an intelligent person sounds when discussing a conspiracy theory on their own, without feedback from another intelligent person informed on the mainstream contrary position, is not a good way to judge their plausibility.
Ben Goldacre of Bad Science has addressed AIDS denialism, most prominently in his book, which I'd recommend checking out if you're interested in this particular issue.
Uh, you read "Dancing Naked in the Mind Field--" a book that contains stories of Mullis doing such a quantity of drugs that he forgot basic concepts like what a poem was, Mullis talking about how he believes strongly in astrology and UFOs, and an episode where he hallucinates John Wayne's voice, which causes him to start shooting his assault rifle into the woods at random in hopes of killing some kind of creature or alien-- and you concluded that Mullis's claims were plausible at all?
That book struck me as incredibly strong evidence that Mullis wasn't credible.
I don't remember him writing about strongly believing in astrology or UFOs. I also don't think him using drugs, even enough to "forget ... what a poem was" to bear on his AIDS-denial claims. What I (previously) found plausible was that he claimed to be unable to find the original research providing evidence that HIV causes AIDS and he also claimed that viruses like HIV are incredibly common and thus unlikely to cause AIDS. Coming from a Nobel Prize winning biochemist, and also being unable to find info about the aforementioned original research, I concluded that his claims were plausible.
Note that I was a teenager at this time, I had not yet been exposed to Bayesian probability, cognitive biases, or any kind of systematic info about rational thinking beyond Feynman books and similar pop-sci books.
I think of myself as relatively intelligent, so I was merely pointing out that reading about AIDS-denial by Kary Mullis was not "positively crazy".
Reading about it isn't "positively crazy," nor would it necessarily be to believe it given no other sources of information, but that doesn't mean it didn't take a fair amount of craziness for him to develop that position in the first place, considering how much selective interpretation of the evidence available to him it required.
I agree, and I realize I was engaging in the kind of nitpicking I find so annoying when other commenters do it. Being an AIDS-denier is irrational.