Here's a more recent (1950) example that I think makes parent's point quite well:
> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.
Alan Turing was an incredible computer scientist and mathematician.
Unfortunately he is out of his area of expertise in physics and human biology/neuroscience (? not sure where telepathy would be if it was to be rigorously studied). This is akin to Freeman Dyson on global warming.
That scientists can have strange ideas is something nobody can dispute. That those strange ideas enter into scientific legitimacy is another story entirely.
The point is that I don't believe Turing's ideas were widely considered strange at the time. The point is more that, even under conditions of honest actions, it's very easy for educated, smart, and sincere thinkers to take for fact something that with time we believe is wildly not fact.
Science even at it's most sincere should always be approached with thoughtful skepticism. The phrase that I hear touted often these days "trust the science", is in essence not how science should be thought of.
There is a difference between "not considered strange at the time" and "science" via scientific publication and subsequent consensus validating the idea. I have mentioned that luminaries can have odd ideas multiple times in this thread, it's not something I seek to deny. However, as I continue to reiterate, these ideas are generally:
1. outside their areas of expertise
2. not validated by independent scientific research
I completely agree that science should be approached with thoughtful skepticism, and I agree that 'trust the science' might not necessarily be the best semantics to use. However, it is not clear that skepticism by all parties should be considered with equal weight. Most of the times, people should "trust the science" because they are not equipped to be skeptical.
> I assume that the reader is familiar with the idea of extra-sensory perception, and the meaning of the four items of it, viz. telepathy, clairvoyance, precognition and psycho-kinesis. These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one's ideas so as to fit these new facts in. Once one has accepted them it does not seem a very big step to believe in ghosts and bogies. The idea that our bodies move simply according to the known laws of physics, together with some others not yet discovered but somewhat similar, would be one of the first to go.
Anyone on this site who doesn't know what this is from should feel a bit of shame in the current era of hype around machine intelligence, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader if you aren't already familiar with this paper.