I wasn't accusing Luke of anything; I was disagreeing with him.
You were claiming he cherrypicked the example; I'll quote again:
... Also, Taube wasn't a scientist or a computer expert or a chess expert or even a philosopher. He was a librarian. A librarian is a fine thing to be, but it doesn't confer the kind of expertise that would make it surprising or even very interesting for Taube to have been wrong here.
If that were true, Luke would be seriously cherrypicking and that is not a harmless error but the sort of biased selection and lying which one would rightly take into account in considering flipping the bozo bit on someone and henceforth ignoring anything they said. This isn't a harmless mistake of attribution or minor peccadilloe that might hurt a single clause or subpoint or tangential argument, this is the sort of thing that discredits an entire line of thought. Maybe you didn't mean it as an accusation, but I treat it as one since if it was true it would be very serious; in much the same way maybe someone bringing up the fact that the lead author on a drug study has taken millions of dollars from the dug company doesn't mean anything serious by it, hey, they're just discussing the paper, but I would take it very seriously indeed and maybe even ignore the study entirely.
You have mischaracterized what I wrote, and made totally false insinuations about my opinions and attitudes
Duly noted, but see above, I don't especially care what you actually think, I care just what you wrote and whether it is a serious issue with Luke's comment.
I do not think, and I did not say, and I had not the slightest intention of implying, that "a librarian is a harmless drudge who just shelves books".
Right. I'm sure you actually meant "I think librarians are fantastic smart people who know everything about everything and have many valid and expert opinions, however it just so happens that chess and AI and cybernetics happens to be one of the few areas where their informed commentary is worthless and ' it doesn't confer the kind of expertise that would make it surprising or even very interesting for Taube to have been wrong here'".
Yes, I know the Wikipedia page says he was "a true innovator in the field of science". Reading what it says he did, though, I really can't see that what he did was science. For the avoidance of doubt, and in the probably overoptimistic hope that saying this will stop you pulling the same what-a-snob-this-person-is move as you already did above, I don't think that "not science" is in any way the same sort of thing as "not valuable" or "not important" or "not difficult".
If working on key organization schemes and pushing forward the field of information science cannot be construed as 'science' no matter how broadly defined, then I guess we'd better exempt computer science and AI from that moniker too.
He was an important innovator in the use of punched cards for document indexing, which is quite a bit like being a computer expert; and he was a PhD in philosophy, which is quite a bit like being a philosopher. None the less, I stand by what I said: neither being a world-class expert in document indexing, nor knowing a lot about punched-card reading machinery, nor being a PhD in philosophy, seems to me to be the kind of expertise that makes it particularly startling if one's wrong about whether machines can play chess.
ಠ_ಠ Actually, that doesn't quite convey my impression of your no-true-Scotsmanning, I'll try that again: ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ ಠ_ಠ A PhD in philosophy is not enough to be called a philosopher? zomgwtfbbq.
peccadilloe
Peccadillo. (Sorry; couldn't resist the temptation to flag that accidental autology for posterity.)
In an erratum to my previous post on Pascalian wagers, it has been plausibly argued to me that all the roads to nuclear weapons, including plutonium production from U-238, may have bottlenecked through the presence of significant amounts of Earthly U235 (apparently even the giant heap of unrefined uranium bricks in Chicago Pile 1 was, functionally, empty space with a scattering of U235 dust). If this is the case then Fermi's estimate of a "ten percent" probability of nuclear weapons may have actually been justifiable because nuclear weapons were almost impossible (at least without particle accelerators) - though it's not totally clear to me why "10%" instead of "2%" or "50%" but then I'm not Fermi.
We're all familiar with examples of correct scientific skepticism, such as about Uri Geller and hydrino theory. We also know many famous examples of scientists just completely making up their pessimism, for example about the impossibility of human heavier-than-air flight. Before this occasion I could only think offhand of one other famous example of erroneous scientific pessimism that was not in defiance of the default extrapolation of existing models, namely Lord Kelvin's careful estimate from multiple sources that the Sun was around sixty million years of age. This was wrong, but because of new physics - though you could make a case that new physics might well be expected in this case - and there was some degree of contrary evidence from geology, as I understand it - and that's not exactly the same as technological skepticism - but still. Where there are sort of two, there may be more. Can anyone name a third example of erroneous scientific pessimism whose error was, to the same degree, not something a smarter scientist could've seen coming?
I ask this with some degree of trepidation, since by most standards of reasoning essentially anything is "justifiable" if you try hard enough to find excuses and then not question them further, so I'll phrase it more carefully this way: I am looking for a case of erroneous scientific pessimism, preferably about technological impossibility or extreme difficulty, where it seems clear that the inverse case for possibility would've been weaker if carried out strictly with contemporary knowledge, after exploring points and counterpoints. (So that relaxed standards for "justifiability" will just produce even more justifiable cases for the technological possibility.) We probably should also not accept as "erroneous" any prediction of technological impossibility where it required more than, say, seventy years to get the technology.