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Alejandro1 comments on Open thread, August 4 - 10, 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Oblique request made without any explanation: can anyone provide examples of beliefs that are incontrovertibly incorrect, but which intelligent people will nonetheless arrive at quite reasonably through armchair-theorising?
I am trying to think up non-politicised, non-controversial examples, yet every one I come up with is a reliable flame-war magnet.
ETA: I am trying to reason about disputes where on the one hand you have an intelligent, thoughtful person who has very expertly reasoned themselves into a naive but understandable position p, and on the other hand, you have an individual who possesses a body of knowledge that makes a strong case for the naivety of p.
What kind of ps exist, and do they have common characteristics? All I can come up with are politically controversial ps, but I'm starting my search from a politically-controversial starting point. The motivating example for this line of reasoning is so controversial that I'm not touching it with a shitty-stick.
I doubt it is possible to find non-controversial examples of anything, and especially of things plausible enough to be believed by intelligent non-experts, outside of the hard sciences.
If this is true, the only plausible examples would be such as "an infinity cannot be larger than another infinity", "time flows uniformly regardless of the observer", "biological species have unchanging essences", and other intuitively plausible statements unquestionably contradicted by modern hard sciences.