Russian Officials To Investigate Regional President's Alien Abduction Claims

wdef writes "The BBC reports that a Russian MP has asked President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate claims by a regional president that he has met aliens on board a spaceship. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalymkia, made his claim in a television interview. Mr Ilyumzhinov said in an interview on primetime television that he had been taken on board an alien spaceship which had come to planet Earth to take samples — and claims to have several witnesses. He has been president of Kalmykia, a small Buddhist region of Russia which lies on the shores of the Caspian Sea, for 17 years. As president of the World Chess Federation, he has spent tens of millions of dollars turning the impoverished republic into a mecca for chess players — building an entire village to host international tournaments. MP Andre Lebedev is not just asking whether Mr Ilyumzhinov is fit to govern. He is also concerned that, if he was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets."

Re:It's Always the Chess Players

[Yvanhoe]

No, Kasparov is running as a candidate in the opposition party against to Vladimir Putin. This can be labelled as "batshit crazy" as well, I must admit.

Re:Two words for you: crazy dictator

[ACS Solver]

While he was appointed for his current term as Head of Kalmykia, he was previously its President without any appointment, simply by being elected. Despite the occasional controversy, he's quite popular, I believe, not in the least due to his position in FIDE. Also, the story itself is nothing extraordinary. Ilyumzhinov has been known for years as an eccentric person, and he had already mentioned being taken to alien ships on a few occasions.

Re:It's Always the Chess Players

[sonnejw0]

Actually, the APOE4 allele that predisposes to Alzheimer's Disease / Dementia also embues its recipients with a higher IQ. The hypothesis is that the brain burns out quickly, so perhaps chess players do become progressively more illogical as they burn out their logic circuits quickly in earlier life.

Re:I don't think it works that way, though

[stwrtpj]

Actually, overuse of neurons can cause them to inflame and die. That's one of the major causes of Alzheimer's.

Um ... no, it's not.

Scientists are still trying to find the exact cause, but nothing has linked it to "overuse" of neurons. If anything, there is some evidence that mental stimulation could hold off or slow the progress of the disease.

Prejudice confirms prejudice?

[Moraelin]

Do you know it? Yep. It is very low compared to other jobs.

Actually, there is no evidence I'm aware of that programmers actually get worse with age. Or any other brain jobm, for that matter. The earliest peak I've seen in actual statistics curves is at 35 for scientific inventions, _but_, here's the important part, it doesn't mean it drops to zero afterwards or anything. The bell curve still has a ways to go. Only around the mid-50's it actually became "only" as high as when fresh out of college. In other domains it essentially only started to drop off when death started to take its toll.

So basically all you illustrate is a case of prejudice "confirming" prejudice, in a lovely example of the begging the question fallacy. (A.k.a., circular logic.) An age limit which is there only because of unsuported age-ism, is taken as proof that that age-ism is right. Basically in the same ways a witch trials were taken as evidence that witchcraft objectively exists.

Plus, there's the ever popular DunningKruger effect [wikipedia.org]. When measured by someone who is still ignorant enough to have realized how much they still have to learn -- be it the stereotypical PHB whose sole competence (ever or any-more) are pr jobs in IT-for-managers ragazines, or the kind of young un' who thinks he's the greatest ever for writing his first 2000 line write-only program -- then yes, experience seems overrated.

But if you have any actual statistics, I'm all ears.