The following is a comment by John Baez, posted on Google+ where I linked to this thread:
It's indeed hard to believe, at a gut level, in the existence of a well-ordered uncountable set. For example: can you take the set of real numbers and linearly order them in some funny way such that any decreasing sequence of them, say a > b > c > ..., "bottoms out" after finitely many steps? (Here > is defined in the funny way you've chosen.) Nobody knows an explicit way to do this, and you can prove that nobody ever will. Yet the "well-ordering theorem" says you can do it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Well-ordering_theorem
What's the catch? This theorem is equivalent to the Axiom of Choice, which cannot be proved (or disproved!) from the rest of the Zermelo-Fraenkel axioms of set theory.
So, we may decide to disbelieve in the Axiom of Choice. But there are other ways of stating it, which make it sound obviously true.
This makes it sound like believing in an uncountable ordinal is equivalent to AC, which would make things easier - lots of mathematicians reject AC. But you might not need AC to assert the existence of a well-ordering of the reals as opposed to any set, and others have claimed that weaker systems than ZF assert a first uncountable ordinal. My own skepticism wasn't so much the existence of any well-ordering of the reals (though I'm willing to believe that no such exists), my skepticism was about the perfect, canonical well-ordering implied by there being ...
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
The hiatus is over with today's publication of chapter 73, and the previous thread is approaching the 500-comment threshold, so let's start a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. This is the place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic and anything related to it.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The fanfiction.net author page is the central location for information about updates and links to HPMOR-related goodies, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: