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NancyLebovitz comments on Perpetual Motion Beliefs - Less Wrong
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How do you distinguish between principles as solid as the conservation laws vs. the commonly held belief (recently established as wrong) that adults don't have significant neuroplasticity?
Which ones seem to have stupidly huge amounts of evidence, lower complexity, deeper ties to the rest of our theories/models of reality, etc?
ie, the usual way: downgrade based on complexity (more complex assumptions = lower probability), upgrade based on huge amounts of evidence, etc.
Or do I misunderstand your question?
No, you understood me correctly.
The problem is a result of confusing consensus with knowledge.
And that's a really easy mistake to make-- it isn't as though there's a handy index to how much evidence there is for commonly held beliefs.
I hope there will be handy indexes once we've accumulated enough accurate beliefs, widely.
It doesn't help that our most accurate beliefs (e.g. the standard model of physics) are some of the most difficult to understand, or that beliefs with lots of evidence (e.g. evolution, the age of Earth) are not widely held.