Yeah, but if you steel-man it, I think he was trying to make something similar to a map-territory distinction. It's often useful to make a distinction between the data and our best interpretation of the data. Some conclusions don't require much extrapolation, but others require a great deal.
On LW we happily discuss with very long inferential distances, and talk about regions of hypothesis space with high densities of unknown unknowns. Most scientists, however, work over much smaller inferential distances, with the intent of meticulously build up a rock solid body of knowledge. If things are "open questions" until they are above a confidence interval of, say, 0.99, then just about everything we discuss here is an open question, as the quote suggests.
Using a historical example which happens to be false just complicates things. If I recall, philosophers first hypothesized a round earth around 600 BCE, but didn't prove it experimentally until 300 BCE.
Yeah, but if you steel-man it,
The act of steelmanning means to argue against a different position then the one the person is holding. It very worthwhile to criticize people for holding positions for the wrong reasons.
I think he was trying to make something similar to a map-territory distinction. It's often useful to make a distinction between the data and our best interpretation of the data. Some conclusions don't require much extrapolation, but others require a great deal.
To me what you are saying doesn't seem like a description of the map-territor...
This is the fourth of Tim Urban's series on Elon Musk, and this time it's about some reasoning processes that are made explicit, which LW readers should find very familiar. It's a potentially useful explicit model of how to make decisions for yourself.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html