Beware Helping Crackpots

Unbelievably, after weeks of my voluntarily trying to help and reason with him, the crackpot who inspired me to post “A Fire-Breathing Dragon Lives In My Garage” by Carl Sagan is now threatening legal action against me.  If he does, it would be entirely frivolous and meritless.  In his characteristically warped manner, he is trying to use the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) as a contract of work between us, demanding that I continue to do more computational work for him, even after he had already denounced computer simulations to be completely inadequate since they clearly proved his theory wrong!  He claims I have breached the NDA by refusing to continue to work for him (all for free, I might add).  Legal counsel advises me that, indeed, anyone can sue anyone else for anything in the great legal system of ours.  That’s gratitude for ya!

The lesson I have learned in all of this is to never again try to help anyone claiming he can beat the odds.  The claim is completely irrational to begin with, and so those who would make it are thus likewise irrational.  I have learned that no amount of objective evidence or rational argument will convince them otherwise.

They insist upon absurdities for one or more of the following reasons:

• They harbor ulterior motives to sell their systems for financial gain, or to entice others to bankroll their risk.
• Their sample size is statistically insignificant, and they don’t or can’t understand the importance or meaning of the long term.
• They are victims of selective memory, preferring to remember what reinforces their claims, but conveniently dismissing any contrary evidence.
• Their claims are based on bugs, such as errors in thinking, mistakes in testing, jumping to conclusions without sufficient evidence, and/or buggy computer programs.
• They are simply intellectually incapable of understanding simple math, that is, they are simply stupid.

And, of course, what confirms their crackpot status is their messianic delusions of being gambling’s saviors, offering straight and narrow paths to revolutionary riches for those drinking their Kool-Aid.  As well, for each time they invoke names such as Einstein and  Hawking, or twist concepts such as chaos, quantum mechanics, relativity, and geometric probability into meaningless gibberish, add another 5 points to their crackpot index.

They are so warped and lost in their delusions that they would even accuse those like me of being agents of the gambling industry, who have nothing better to do than deliberately spread false information for the purpose of keeping the public blind, so as to keep them hopelessly losing.  They seem unable or unwilling to comprehend that a far easier and effective way to eliminate a legitimate threat to the casinos’ bottom line is for the house to simply change the rules back into their favor!

Sadly, victims all too eager to inhale their sweet lies may wind up paying hefty tuition before they realize the simple truth, which was free all along.