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Torgamous comments on Stranger Than History - Less Wrong
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Read my post again. It's not a matter of speed vs colour, it's a matter of “there is a maximum possible value of [quantity], much greater than almost all values of [quantity] you experience in everyday life, and weirder and weirder things happen the closer you get to it” vs “there is one particular value of [quantity], well within the range of values of [quantity] you experience in everyday life, at which weird things happens, though nothing weird happens at even very slightly smaller or larger values of [quantity]”.
Anyway, I think the post would be more effective at getting the point across if the true statements were clearly weirder (even factoring in hindsight bias) than the false ones, whereas here the intention appears to be making them approximately equally as weird.
Yes, if given a choice to believe one or the other, we'd all probably choose the speed one. But the person in 1901 is not being given the color option as a counterpoint, they're just being told "if you go really, really fast, reality turns into an Escher painting." I don't know about you, but had I been born in 1901, I'm pretty sure I'd sooner believe in Scientology.
(Of course, someone in 1901 would answer “Who the hell is Escher?” :-))
ETA: And “What the hell is Scientology?”, too. Jokes aside, I would probably agree if I was a randomly chosen person in 1901, but I'm not sure I would if I was a randomly chosen physics graduate student in 1901. I mean, If there's a reason why only four years later the Annalen der Physik published an article proposing special relativity but none proposing Scientology. (I'd probably still consider quantum mechanics less plausible than Scientology, though.)