Interesting, what part about this did you think was flawed?
Multiple parts:
In reality the Ancient Greek came up with the concept that the earth is round because it's intuitively true when you look at ships on the horizon. No person from whom you can reasonable say that he was educated to be a scientist was in position to find flatness intuitive.
The second part would be to look at where scientists first disagreed over the shape of the earth. Newton's theory predicted an bulge on the equator while Descartes theory predicted more of an egg shaped earth. Both of those camps considered their theory to be true and the p...
This is the fourth of Tim Urban's series on Elon Musk, and this time it's about some reasoning processes that are made explicit, which LW readers should find very familiar. It's a potentially useful explicit model of how to make decisions for yourself.
http://waitbutwhy.com/2015/11/the-cook-and-the-chef-musks-secret-sauce.html