It is because the person is evidently a con-man.
So it is not as much "interesting" but "illuminating" that supposedly smart people like scientists can be just as easily mislead as the random person responding to an email scam.
So it is not as much "interesting" but "illuminating" that supposedly smart people like scientists can be just as easily mislead as the random person responding to an email scam.
I suspect if pushed to replace himself as governance for GISAID (which I suspect he controls alone... I doubt the mentioned technical or governance boards exist) he may well lock off all access to the data that's accumulated or even delete it to prevent someone from taking it from him.
The reason smart people are no more resistant to being conned than anybody else is because conning people is an emotional approach, not an intellectual one.
Any given specific con may not be one that will sucker everybody (in fact, it certainly won't), but con artists tailor their cons to their target. The one a smart person will fall for is different than the one a dumb person will fall for.
As Brian Brushwood says in his excellent podcast "The World's Greatest Con"... "We don't get conned because we're stupid. We get conned because we're human."
A subgroup is either more X, less X, the same X to the limits of testing, or has too complicated a relation with X to fit into the above.
The only "absolute" aspects are things like the median and deviation. No positions are being pushed to the extreme.
Even better, "no more" covers both "less" and "same", so it's even easier for a statement like that to be correct.
Is the term "smart people" sufficiently vague that it would need refinement for the level of certainty you're describing?
but smart people are more resistant - for the mere fact that they probably know more and are better versed in the goings of life -
I am surprised that anyone would think otherwise.
Nah, you just run a different playbook. You gotta leverage that arrogance. Like Bankman-Fried.
I was talking to a con artist once who took the point even further. He said smart people are actually easier to con for a few reasons.
The smarter a person is, the better they are at working out a chain of reasoning that can "prove" the con isn't a con. Since a con is appealing to human emotion, not logic, you can make a smart person want to believe the con so much that they'll work out the "proof" that it's legit all by themselves.