It is too easy to come up with a just so story like this. How would you rephrase it to make it testable?
Here is a counterstory:
Children have a survival need to learn only well-tested knowledge; they cannot afford to waste their precious developmental years believing wrong ideas. Adults, however, have already survived their juvenile years, and so they are presumably more fit. Furthermore, once an adult successfully reproduces, natural selection no longer cares about them; neither senescence nor gullibility affect an adult's fitness. Therefore, we should expect children to be skeptical and adults to be gullible.
This counterstory doesn't function.
A child's development is not consciously controlled; and they are protected by adults; so believing incorrect things temporarily doesn't harm their development at all.
If you wish to produce a counterstory, make it an actual plausible one. Even if it were the case that children tended to be more skeptical of claims, your story would REMAIN obviously false; whereas Constant's story would remain an important factor, and would raise the question of why we don't see what would be expected given the relevant facts.
The quantum physics textbooks I read were happy to define linear operator-ness in great gory detail, but they never actually came out and said, "This is not something physically happening to the wavefunction. We are just using this math trick to extract an average value."
I think is is a common problem for many mathematical conventions in physics.
The same thing happened be me in high school physics. I was confused by the torque vector, and I spent an entire year thinking that somehow rotation causes a force perpendicular to the plane of motion....
I'm an artist, and believe that any two given individuals will not share an identical color perception.
Being an artist has nothing to do with the accuracy of this belief.
I've always had issues with infinity and transcendental numbers. For instance, pi is said to be transcendental as it cannot be expressed as the ratio of two integers; yet, in a sense, is the ratio of two numbers - the circumference over the diameter.
There are two problems here. First, irrational numbers are the ones that cannot be expressed as a fraction of integers. Transendentals ...
I am looking forward to the API. I am much more likely to continually use Beeminder if it can be automatically updated or, failing that, updated easily from a mobile device. The site is actually OK (not great) to navigate with a phone, but typing updates is not that easy.
Thanks for the hard work. Beeminder looks like a great tool.