I had a long correspondence with someone, about the Jewish concept of ‘chain of tradition‘.

One specific argument mentioned had to do with how impossible (or difficult) it is to fool “wise” people (whatever ‘wise’ means). This was part of a bigger claim, trying to explain that old traditions must be true, especially given that every author is supposedly smarter than his readers.

Eventually we reached the conclusion that it is not so difficult to fool people, wise/smart people included.

And then came the twist: If it is easy to fool wise people then, as a special case, it is also easy to fool wise people about how difficult it is to fool wise people…