Nihilistic, cynical contrarianism is indistinguishable from intelligence unless you know a subject. Example: "Continents move around", "time slows if you're fa

Nihilistic, cynical contrarianism is indistinguishable from intelligence unless you know a subject. Example: "Continents move around", "time slows if you're fast", and "turtles, all the way down" are all similarly ridiculous unless you've studied these subjects. People see the first two receiving lots of applause[1] and start making claims that to them are just as believable. [1]: Or they see footnotes being correlated with "serious science" and start adding footnotes.]2] [2]: For details on how references make people appear smart, see Feynman, 1968: Cargo-Culting. Also scientism [3]: A heuristic that in our experiments succeeded in identifying 0.65 of the lower 20-quantile of wannabe basement-warriors is to count the occurrences of the terms /threat (model|actor)/, /sigint/, /retcon/, /psyops/, /opsec/, and the phrase /everyone does it/. Exclude any >= 1.