I happened upon a YouTube video about the Collatz Conjecture, a math problem unsolved for decades, and in the comments are people posting their proofs, enjoying

I happened upon a YouTube video about the Collatz Conjecture, a math problem unsolved for decades, and in the comments are people posting their proofs, enjoying puzzling over it even though they get nowhere. And there are people posting that they have a proof, understand and know the answer. It is possible that someone on the planet really does understand what nobody else does, but it is far more likely that these people have an inferiority chip on their shoulder, want to join in, want respect, or are trolling. Since there are a lot more people on Earth feeling low, excluded, or enjoying teasing others than people with world class mathematical insight. And since people with worldclass math insight about the Collatz Conjecture won't be the ones watching "introduction to the Collatz Conjecture" videos on YouTube. Worse than that, the union of all the people who claim to have insider information about some amazing ability is enormous. Yes you are convinced by quantum entanglement wormholes, but why aren't you convinced by Royal Raymond Rice's machines? Why aren't you convinced by Hollow Earth or Flat Earth? Why aren't you convinced by the Cottingley Faeries? By Breatharianism? By Kirlean Auras, by Lovecraft's Edler Gods, by the Michael Prophecies, by ghosts as traumatic mental energy encoded in nearby rocks, by... every other thing. It's the same question as "Why do you believe in Christianity instead of Hinduism/Jainism/Shintoism/Daoism/Islam/...". We can all write stories of things which are not real; we can't discern whether other people are telling stories or truths; there's a limited amount of truth, but an infinite amount of stories. That makes it far more likely that any given claim is story, not truth. The only way we have to separate them is to look for evidence of truth. Rules of thumb: Would it be really awesomecool if UFOs exist? Yes? That will bias one towards thinking they exist, and one should notice this and counterbalance away in response. It's easy to be tempted by things we want to be true. Would it be really awesomecool if telepathy existed and also be convenient and remove some of the drudgery of life, the waiting until meeting someone before talking to them, the traveling to where they are, the limitations of words? That will double-bias one towards it because the easier way is tempting, and one should be double-suspicious of one's reason for believeing. Would it be really awesomecool if one had insider information and knew the Truth(tm) about aliens, UFOs, the Pyramids, the Lord, when other people don't, giving the insider a feeling of superiority? That will double-bias one towards believing it, and one should be double-suspicious of their motives. Would it be really awesomecool if one could control other people's minds, and it would tickle a power fantasy; coolness, secret knowledge, insider status, and amazing power if it was true? That will quadruple-bias one towards it and makes it even more suspicious and story-like. And you came back to me with "you have been rooted" "sorry to burst your bubble" "you're late to the thing I knew ages ago" "there's a secret power fantasy" "{respected group} are all fools compared to {secret insider information}". I may be late to the party, but I worried about Spontaneous Human Combustion and watched the X-Files, and looked in the sky for UFOs and feared ghost sightings and thought it was cool when reports came in of an invisible force-field blocking a car from moving in a car park, I had a subscription to the Fortean Times and couldn't help but notice how the ghost reports and paranormal reports were a tiny fraction of it, and most of it was a double-headed snake or a shadow seen at night in a remote village which maybe was a wild animal but maybe was El Chupacabra. Time moves on. The world stays the same. Terence McKenna's talking to the mushroom didn't warn clairvoyantly warn him about dying of brain cancer, the High Altitude Active Auroral Research Project (HAAARP) which was supposed to be a front for mind control, wasn't. The YouTube videos of people hearing trumpets in the sky around the world, was a hoax. Cameras with easy access to double-exposure and out-of-focus gave way to a world where high quality smartphones are sold by the hundreds of millions every month, and BigFoot has become an expert at avoiding all of them. The patterns of paranormal stories become clearer - they give the believer a reason to feel unique, special, superior. They compelling and tempting and cool, within the limits of their time. They are unprovable and unrepeatable physically. They are irrefutable and un-disprovable logically. Nobody talked of the Cottingley Faeries being involved in Quantum Entanglement. When you watch an X-Men film and see Magneto lift a sports stadium or a battleship and then you look at real-world claims of telekinesis where someone tries to wiggle a thread or tip over a balanced playing card, the difference is stark. When you look at things like the woman who claimed to be able to smell Parkinson's disease[1] she was asked to smell the t-shirts of 12 people and correctly sorted 6 with Parkinson's and 6 without, first time, no excuses about how the spirits weren't right or the sceptical energy changed her ability, or how it only worked when her Chakras were aligned. When people claim to have super face-recognition ability[2], tests show they actually have. You know what happens when I read your link about the voices and "While she was abroad, and still taking the thioridazine, the voices returned. They told her that they wanted her to return to England immediately as there was something wrong with her for which she should have immediate treatment"? I get a spine tingling feeling and mild dread. A desire for something more than mundane reality, escapism, other worlds, possibilities. I also get that when reading HP Lovecraft, A Shadow over Innsmouth. It doesn't mean I believe in people who have been interbreeding with nightmarish aquatic deities to gain immortality. I have fairly clear memories of places I dreamed about, more clear memories than of some places I have actually been. I don't think that's telepresence or alternate realities because the same brain which is remembering where I have been is generating hypotheses and imagineering and storing memories of predictions so I can know what I think will happen; it's much simpler if those two things overlap than if there is clairvoyance and remote viewing involved. Philip K. Dick saw Rome. Did you see the Red Dwarf quip where Rimmer observes that everyone who claims a past life was Alexander the Great and nobody was Alexander the Great's Chief Eunuch? Why did Philip K. Dick not observe ancient Mesopotamia, the Okavango Delta, the Inca societies, the Aboriginal Australian deserts, any of hundreds of millions of years of pre-historic Earth jungle tribes, Belgium in 1839 or West Africa in 1600BC? Why Rome? And why did the woman hearing voices hear people from Great Ormond Street Children's Hospital (which she had heard of) when she was an adult, why didn't she hear voices from former employees of The Department of Neurosurgery at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Utah? It follows on with "Her children were well, so she had no reason to worry about them" which makes one wonder why the voices were so clear and precise and informative but still vague enough that she had no idea what they wanted to communicate. The end of the link has "There was a group at the case conference who offered a different opinion. Their view was that, the total lack of physical signs notwithstanding, it was unlikely that a tumour of that size had had absolutely no effect on the patient. “She must have felt something,” they argued. They suggested that a funny feeling in her head had led her to fear that she had a brain tumour. That fear had led to her experience of hallucinatory voices. She may have unconsciously taken in more information about various hospitals than she realised, and this information was reproduced by her mind as part of the auditory hallucinatory experience.". If it was a common everyday experience for people to hear voices telling people new information, that would change things. But we're looking at it wondering if it's true or if it's a story and how we might tell from outside, and we have one hypothesis where she was alive for decades and remembered the address of a hospital, and another hypothesis where there is an afterlife, it interacts with the world, spirits from the other side can see into brains with the precision of a computer aided tomography scanner, can communicate with auditory hallucinations in a language the recipient understands, and - despite existing in an afterlife where they are capable of conscious thought and willful intention(?) - still think it "helps" to keep someone alive (why, in that case?). > "Known states may be pushed through entanglement, we just don’t know how." No, they may not be, by definition. If you take a pair of gloves, put the right hand glove in one box, the left hand glove in another, shuffle the boxes and send one to Timbuktoo, you can open your box and see a left hand glove and know the person in Timbuktoo has the right hand glove. That doesn't mean you can put the glove on and somehow poke the person in Timbuktoo. (comment too long; cont).