Humans are incredible un-secure systems, so compelling arguments can be made for almost any position that anyone takes seriously. Political, identity, and commercialized issues are where you’ll find the most pre-existing examples, simply because that’s where people have incentives (psychological or tangible) to make arguments whether or not a position is true.
I guess you’re asking for examples that we (presumed intellectuals) find most compelling, but note that there’s a serious selection effect going on here, because now you’re not selecting merely contrarian ideas, you’re selecting contrarian ideas and arguments that are pre-filtered for appeal to the sort of person you’re interested in researching. You’ll get a very different set of ideas and arguments here than if you ask alternative medicine practitioners what arguments they find compelling. And if you use these different sets of arguments in a study, I predict you’ll find they convince quite different sets of people.
To give a really on the nose example, consider the contrarian position “I have the power to make a rubber band colder than the surrounding room just by pulling on it.” There are two different convincing arguments for this, which might convince very different groups.
One argument is that this is actually a fact of thermodynamics, because rubber bands actually become more ordered when you stretch them (like straightening our a tangled string) and more disordered when allowed to relax, and this actually causes a change in entropy, which causes a change in temperature, and so they become colder when you pull on them.
This is a fairly convincing argument, especially in our society where we might be disposed to believe a sciencey argument just on its tone and vocabulary.
Another argument is that I know this because late one night I was playing around with a rubber band, and I noticed that if I focused really hard on the temperature of the rubber band, it became colder when I pulled on it to stretch it out. I think this is just one of those weird facts about humans—like have you ever grabbed something hot, like a hot pan, and thought for sure that you should have a burn, but weren’t burned at all? There are some unexplained phenomena that would make a lot more sense if humans sometimes had a special connection with the heat of their surroundings, and I promise you that I’ve noticed that I can do this with rubber bands, and I’m sure if you concentrate, you can too.
Humans are incredible un-secure systems, so compelling arguments can be made for almost any position that anyone takes seriously. Political, identity, and commercialized issues are where you’ll find the most pre-existing examples, simply because that’s where people have incentives (psychological or tangible) to make arguments whether or not a position is true.
I guess you’re asking for examples that we (presumed intellectuals) find most compelling, but note that there’s a serious selection effect going on here, because now you’re not selecting merely contrarian ideas, you’re selecting contrarian ideas and arguments that are pre-filtered for appeal to the sort of person you’re interested in researching. You’ll get a very different set of ideas and arguments here than if you ask alternative medicine practitioners what arguments they find compelling. And if you use these different sets of arguments in a study, I predict you’ll find they convince quite different sets of people.
To give a really on the nose example, consider the contrarian position “I have the power to make a rubber band colder than the surrounding room just by pulling on it.” There are two different convincing arguments for this, which might convince very different groups.
One argument is that this is actually a fact of thermodynamics, because rubber bands actually become more ordered when you stretch them (like straightening our a tangled string) and more disordered when allowed to relax, and this actually causes a change in entropy, which causes a change in temperature, and so they become colder when you pull on them.
This is a fairly convincing argument, especially in our society where we might be disposed to believe a sciencey argument just on its tone and vocabulary.
Another argument is that I know this because late one night I was playing around with a rubber band, and I noticed that if I focused really hard on the temperature of the rubber band, it became colder when I pulled on it to stretch it out. I think this is just one of those weird facts about humans—like have you ever grabbed something hot, like a hot pan, and thought for sure that you should have a burn, but weren’t burned at all? There are some unexplained phenomena that would make a lot more sense if humans sometimes had a special connection with the heat of their surroundings, and I promise you that I’ve noticed that I can do this with rubber bands, and I’m sure if you concentrate, you can too.