This is a classic story indeed, I remember reading it in my “early days”.

This has a grain of wisdom for this day, for HN no less.

All of these smarty pants who make claims as to their certainty of beliefs regarding one thing or another, “it's a basic fact …”, “clearly … useless … not only … nonoperative, but it … couldn't affect anything”.

While it is a fun story, and the conclusion is about what I would guess was occurring, these emphatic assertions and confident assumptions are prevalent signs among over confident intellectuals, and more common among our culture than magic switches!