Hi, I wrote the post. I want to be good at being wrong, I want to be excellent at it. I aspire to develop habits of thought that will protect me and my peers from nursing too gently the need to be right. I thought I might learn something from the ugliest cases.
What happens to even the greatest minds that causes them to get attached to their theories? I don’t know, but your examples will help me find out. A history of baggage? A reputation to protect? Mere age? Pure guts? I agree with pragmatist that Einstein’s concerns about QM aren’t a great example of the prompt. Hoyle, on the other hand, is a great example—he resisted the Big Bang to his death—for decades after it had become the most plausible model.
Each of the bulleted examples up top was a great mind with too much emotional baggage to keep from being left behind by science. I don’t want it to happen to me, and generally I want to cultivate in scientific discourse a tone that makes it safe for even the most agitated reasoner to bow out with grace. Thanks for your input and for your leads.
I think a lot about signal detection theory, and I think that’s still the best I can come up with for this question. There are false positives, there are false negatives, they are both important to keep in mind, the cost of reducing one is an increase in the other, humans and human systems will always have both.
So, for example, even the most over-generous public welfare system will have deserving people off the dole and even the most stingy system will have undeserving recipients (by whatever definition), so the question (for a welfare system, say) isn’t how do we prevent abuse, but how many abusers are we willing to tolerate for every 100 deserving recipients we reject? Also useful in lots of medical discussions, legal discussions, pop science discussions, etc.