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pragmatist 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.
Bell's spaceship paradox.
According to Bell, he surveyed his colleagues at CERN (clearly a group of intelligent, qualified people) about this question, and most of them got it wrong. Although, to be fair, the conflict here is not between expert reasoning and domain knowledge, since the physicists at CERN presumably possessed all the knowledge you need (basic special relativity, really) to get the right answer.