Time Traveling Hipsters

That guy in the middle seems out of place.

This is a photo taken in 1941 at a bridge opening in Canada. It’s pretty widely known to be reconciled with fashion around that era and an internet conspiracy, but definitely an odd outfit. You can read the reddit thread linked.

• Sunglasses look modern

• Very unusual hair style for the era, looks like many of my tech bro friends

• Hoodie?

• Modern digital camera? (at least it appears to be one)

• Logo on a t-shirt, in the 40s?

• Everyone else in the photo looks normal for the time

In contrast with the other people in the photo, you start to ask yourself, what are the odds a guy looking like that is standing there at a random bridge opening in the 40s? Why would he dress so differently? What do the other people in the photo think of him?

There were also a lot of people living in Canada in the 40s, lots of pictures were taken, and really this is the only one where people are saying, “huh, that’s weird…” of probably millions of photos. It’s within distribution that it’s just an oddly dressed guy at a bridge opening, just rare.

My observation that’s interesting is that it’s hard for your brain to process extremely low probabilities. My P(photo_real) is extremely low. So is my P(time_travel). The thing that is hard for my mind to reconcile is that my P(super_intelligence) in the next 10 years has gone way up in the last month. The things that prior on P(super_intelligence) are all wild, wacky and out of distribution by today’s standards. It demands a lot of humility for what we don’t know. Time travel IS possible within theoretical physics, just requires something crazy like falling into a black hole, which seems insanely improbable from today’s vantage point.

Humans are very bad at estimating exponents, low probabilities etc 0.00001 and 0.00000000001 both approximate to zero in the human mind. So really, IDK ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, maybe this guy is a super based time traveler from the year 2035…. Only one way to find out.

Edit: wrote this tweet after I posted this article, thought it was relevant

Link to tweet...