Manfred 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.
Downwind faster than the wind. See seven pages of posts here for examples of people getting it wrong.
Kant was famously wrong when he claimed that space had to be flat.
As discussed previously, this exact claim seems suspiciously absent from the first Critique.
I agree that Kant doesn't seem to have ever considered non-euclidean geometry, and thus can't really be said to be making an argument that space is flat. If we could drop an explanation of general relativity, he'd probably come to terms with it. On the other hand, he just assumes that two straight lines can only intersect once, and that this describes space, which seems pretty much what he was accused of.
I don't see this in the quoted passage. He's trying to illustrate the nature of propositions in geometry, and doesn't appear to be arguing that the parallel postulate is universally true. "Take, for example," is not exactly assertive.
Also, have a care: those two paragraphs are not consecutive in the Critique.