"In the response, the editor said that (s)he has now sent the article out to another editor, one who is quite famous in this area, but who also agreed that this paper should be rejected without being sent out for peer review. In this reply, the famous editor said:
"I should point out that most stock markets around the planet devote considerable resources to looking for temporally anomalous market behavior --- unusual trading patterns before significant news events. When found, such signals are not typically attributed to time travelers, but more prosaically to insider trading."
I agree! This is one reason why we did not look for evidence of time travel in stock market trading. Early on, our group had discussed (briefly) this idea. On one hand, I was glad that finally we had a real criticism to address, but on the other hand, this famous editor's comment indicated to me, once again, that the journal editors did not fully appreciate the novelty, power, simplicity, and falsifiability of our approach. Instead, they gave straw-man criticisms that really meant, in my view, that they did not want to consider a manuscript so unconventional. In my reply, I argued in detail against this criticism and again asked that the manuscript at least be sent out for formal peer review"
I think what the response meant may be - even if a tweet about Pope Francis before Pope Francis was pope was found, it isn't sufficient to prove time travel exist - the tweeter could have a uncle who is involved in vatican politics and the tweeter read some of his uncle's notes. The stock market example was an analogy.
> the tweeter could have a uncle who is involved in vatican politics and the tweeter read some of his uncle's notes
That wouldn't explain knowing about the name. Of course it is possible that someone would have guessed at possible names for a pope. Since the name is inspired from the name of Francis of Assisi, it is not inconceivable, so a search would still not be proof.
But the name "Pope Francis" did not exist until Jorge Mario Bergoglio was chosen as pope. Pope Francis has stated that he himself got to think about the name based on an encounter with another cardinal during the conclave. The other cardinal had whispered to him "don't forget the poor" when it was becoming clear that he was being elected. Unless he is lying about how he selected the name, one could thus assume that knowledge of the name prior to the start of the conclave would indicate time travel.
This is one of the reasons the name is a good thing to search for; as is the asteroid name. In both cases we have pretty solid knowledge of a cutoff before which the name was not known because it did not yet exist.
(Of course, the incidence of "pope Francis" in a search would not in and of itself be conclusive proof of prior knowledge.)
The stock market, on the other hand is a bad one because it is so simple to fool: Yes, markets checks for odd large investments right before major announcements. But there's no point in doing that, and the issue of checks for insider trading might deter a time traveler. If you know how the stock market will perform in detail far in advance, though, rather than sit on a single tip about some deal, you can do amazingly well by moving sufficiently small amounts into each of a bunch of shares sufficiently long in advance that it'd be just noise.
Pope names form a fairly limited set. I bet if you asked 100,000 Catholics to guess the next pope's name, > 0 would get it right. I'm actually surprised there isn't tons of speculation about it. Maybe it's not a "thing" or sacrilegious or this sort of speculation is not on the Internet?
Does it? For starters consider that "Francis" was a new name - he's the first pope to use it.
He was also the first pope in a millennium to pick an entirely new name (John Paul I obviously was the first pope John Paul, but he picked two names that has a very long tradition, and that are obviously names with a very special connection to the church; consider also that some disliked that John Paul I broke new ground that way, even though it involved using two very well respected traditional names).
> I bet if you asked 100,000 Catholics to guess the next pope's name, > 0 would get it right. I'm actually surprised there isn't tons of speculation about it. Maybe it's not a "thing" or sacrilegious or this sort of speculation is not on the Internet?
[EDIT: The paper actually mentions that they did find one single mention of Pope Francis, which was then reviewed and found to be overtly speculative, so they did run into this]
Maybe. Maybe not. But there is speculation about pope names. A lot of it. And apparently despite lots and lots of articles that were written about it none of them got it right.
And here is one gives the list of papal names _after_ Francis was chosen, and points out that his successor _could_ choose to do like Francis, but pope Francis was the _first pope to do so since the tenth century_, as mentioned above. So prior to Francis, there was a millennium long tradition creating a strong expectation that Bergoglio/Francis would pick from the list of past names rather than break new ground.
Here's one from before Francis was chosen, which speculates on names, and suggests the most likely names would come from the list of past popes, and gives some suggestions:
Knowing, as we do now, that he was willing to ignore the list, many might have guessed Francis, but I'm much less confident they would before.. Especially given that from a few searches it appears that even now most appears to expect the next pope again to most likely pick one of the traditional names.
This also lists odds from the bookmaker Paddy Power, giving Leo 3-to-1, Peter 2-to-1, Gregory 6-to-1, Pius 8-to-1. And he gave "Joseph" as his one new name.
One of the commenters then goes on to reference a CNN article on the name choice, that says amongst others this:
> Allen described the name selection as "the most stunning" choice and "precedent shattering."
> "There are cornerstone figures in Catholicism," such as St. Francis, Allen said. Figures of such stature as St. Francis of Assisi seem "irrepeatable -- that there can be only one Francis," he added.
Maybe others would feel differently - that Francis would be a good name exactly because of how important St. Francis of Assisi is to the church, but this is nevertheless an interesting reaction.
> If you know how the stock market will perform in detail far in advance, though, rather than sit on a single tip about some deal, you can do amazingly well by moving sufficiently small amounts into each of a bunch of shares sufficiently long in advance that it'd be just noise.
If, however, you consider the stock market to be a chaotic system, your small trades will change the market's performance.
We should assume that, but that affects your ability to make predictions to some extent past the moment you arrive, and so you may find your knowledge quickly becomes out of date, but you don't need to be 100% right - your knowledge needs to remain "close enough" for you to beat the odds with some reasonable margin.
This point is quite immaterial. If they did find a mention of "pope Francis", then yes, they would have to consider alternative explanations before jumping to the conclusion of time travel. However, they didn't, so it's perfectly reasonably to report that there is no evidence of time travelers talking of pope Francis.
I just googled but couldn't hit it (+at work) but I remember an instance of someone editing Wikipedia claiming some known person had been found dead a day or so before it happened. Police investigated and found it was just a freak coincidence — just some guy vandalising the page. Kind of "a million monkeys" in practice: given there's loads of nonsense additions, at some point over a few years they will accurately predict future events.
This happens a lot on twitter, I follow a number of football (soccer) account and often when a shock result or event happens people search for other that have predicted it, to retweet. Also don't forget paul, the match predicting octopus!
They also often search for people (typically other professionals) predicting the opposite in order to embarrass them.
"I should point out that most stock markets around the planet devote considerable resources to looking for temporally anomalous market behavior --- unusual trading patterns before significant news events. When found, such signals are not typically attributed to time travelers, but more prosaically to insider trading."
I agree! This is one reason why we did not look for evidence of time travel in stock market trading. Early on, our group had discussed (briefly) this idea. On one hand, I was glad that finally we had a real criticism to address, but on the other hand, this famous editor's comment indicated to me, once again, that the journal editors did not fully appreciate the novelty, power, simplicity, and falsifiability of our approach. Instead, they gave straw-man criticisms that really meant, in my view, that they did not want to consider a manuscript so unconventional. In my reply, I argued in detail against this criticism and again asked that the manuscript at least be sent out for formal peer review"
I think what the response meant may be - even if a tweet about Pope Francis before Pope Francis was pope was found, it isn't sufficient to prove time travel exist - the tweeter could have a uncle who is involved in vatican politics and the tweeter read some of his uncle's notes. The stock market example was an analogy.