Oh that simple.. well yes sometimes the majority is right and sometimes it is wrong.
Your comment doesn't seem to respond to Alex in a useful way. Alex's point is not just that the majority is sometimes right and sometimes wrong but that there's a tendency for it to be more right than wrong even for abstract issues. In this context, simply saying what you have said seems to be a restatement of your earlier argument rather than anything new.
Incidentally, there are other examples of how in large areas of abstract thought the majority will generally be right. The speed of light example is a pretty weak one. Here are some more broad examples....
Religion apparently makes people happier. Is that evidence for the truth of religion, or against it?
(Of course, it matters which religion we're talking about, but let's just stick with theism generally.)
My initial inclination was to interpret this as evidence against theism, in the sense that it weakens the evidence for theism. Here's why:
We could also put this in mathematical terms, where F represents an increase in the prior probability of our encountering the evidence. Since that prior is a denominator in Bayes' equation, a bigger one means a smaller posterior probability--in other words, weaker evidence.
OK, so that was my first thought.
But then I had second thoughts: Perhaps the evidence points the other way? If we reframe the finding as "Atheism causes unhappiness," or posit that contrarians (such as atheists) are dispositionally unhappy, does that change the sign of the evidence?
Obviously, I am confused. What's going on here?