@mguhlin @AlliFlowers
The greatest minds in history espoused really dumb stuff, sometimes in their own areas of expertise. We have to assume that the rest of us are even dumber than that.
Follow
@tofugolem @mguhlin Think of mankind as a single body so that in the deep past they didn’t know any better - the earth is flat. Now we know better because science has proven it.
@AlliFlowers @mguhlin
I was thinking about Einstein's cosmological constant (even if modern physicists found a reason to put that term back, his original reason for putting it there was dumb), or Newton's original proposal for a theory of gravity, or Newton's "only God knows" comment about the 3-body problem (setting up that zinger by Lagrange).
But I suppose platonism fits in to what you said. That was also something really dumb by someone really smart.