When I was a kid I had this book called “Thinking Physics”, which was basically a book of multiple choice physics questions (such as “an elephant and a feather are falling, which one experiences more air resistance ?”, or “Kepler and Galileo made telescopes around the same time and Kepler’s was adopted widely, why ?”) aimed to point out where our natural instincts or presuppositions go against how physics actually work, and explaining, well, how physics actually work.
Really, the simple idea that physics are a habit of thought that have to be worked on because our defaults are incorrect (or, as I realized much later, are correct only in the special case of the everyday life of a social hominid) has been helpful to me ever since, and too few people have it or realize it’s important.
I think it gets to what you’re saying : one shouldn’t learn physics (or anything for that matter) as a list of facts or methods to apply in the classroom, one should work to integrate them into one’s mental model of the world. Which is not as easy as it sounds.
I’ve been thinking of this question lately, and while I agree with the main thrust of your article, I don’t think that giving all possible objections is always possible (it can get really long, and sometimes there are thematic issues). Which is why I think multiple people responding tends to be a good thing.
But more to the point, I don’t think I agree that RA is moving the goalposts. Because really, every position has many arguments pro or con where even if just one is demolished the position can survive off the others. I think the arguing technique that really is problematic is abandoning position A to go to position B while still taking A as true, thus continuing to make arguments based on A or going back to asserting A once B doesn’t work out.
I think that if someone explicitly concedes A before going on to B, and doesn’t go back to A afterwards (unless they’ve got new arguments of course) they aren’t doing anything wrong.