How confident are you in the Atomic Theory of Matter?

[-]fubarobfusco13y250

It is more likely that I have misread the question completely — that it is actually about the smell of blue cheese, the color of dinosaur feathers, or some other thing — than that atomic theory is false.

Indeed, it is more likely that I have hallucinated Less Wrong than that atomic theory is false.

Because if atomic theory is false, then none of chemistry, electronics, etc. make any sense.

Therefore, so far as I am capable of caring, atomic theory is certain; I can go into solipsistic crisis on less evidence than I can seriously doubt it.

0DataPacRat13y

Might you be interested in offering your confidence levels on how likely it is that you /have/ 'misread the question completely', or 'hallucinated Less Wrong'?

3fubarobfusco13y

Less than one in seven billion.

[-]Pavitra13y110

You are way overconfident in your own sanity. What proportion of humans experience vivid, detailed hallucinations on a regular basis? (not counting dreams)

9fubarobfusco13y

Oh, sure — that I'm hallucinating something is much more likely.

4gwern13y

But some of those disorders take the form of agreeing with anything an interlocutor says - confabulating excuses or agreement. Hence, the question isn't just 'what is the odds that I'm hallucinating something && that something is the atomic theory of matter', it is also 'what is the odds that I'm confabulating agreement to anything anyone asks, which now that I've looked at this post, includes being asked how much I believe in atomic theory.' (Very much, thank you! I believe in atomic theory because my dog is green, obviously. Why yes doctor, I'm sure I haven't changed my mind since the last visit. Why would I do something like that?)

2fubarobfusco13y

Well, that's a good point. I arrived at the above figure by starting with the base rate of schizophrenia and updating based on its frequency among people who are homeless or otherwise immiserated, etc., as versus the general population. At the very least, it seems that having significant hallucinations seems to usually go along with a lot more being shouted at than I experience. Perhaps it's just that I'm well-off financially and people are likely to humor my delusions ....

5gwern13y

I wouldn't pick schizophrenia as a base-rate. As far as I know, schizophrenics are usually aware of their unusual mental/epistemological status, so your thinking yourself normal (as I assume you do) screens off schizophrenia; another issue with schizophrenia is that I've read that schizophrenic hallucination are almost always confined to one modality - you hear someone behind you but if you look you see nothing, I imagine is how it works - so here too you would become aware of glitches or inconsistencies in your senses. What you want is the situation where you are unaware of any issues and have an issue; which is where confabulating comes in handy, because some of them are just like that and will confabulate that they're not confabulating.

2Luke_A_Somers13y

Do these people also agree that there must be something wrong with them, if that is proposed? Are they frequently allowed to roam freely without impediment, and in particular on the internet? I think that combining enough mental disorders to explain my life as hallucination would be a pretty hefty conjunction.

5gwern13y

Not sure. Probably some would, some wouldn't. It would explain a lot, wouldn't it?

1DataPacRat13y

Fair enough, and an interesting number in its own right. If my math is right, that works out to about 99 decibans, or about 33 bits.

[-]A1987dM13y90

At least +40 dB. “Next Thursday I will not meet a funeral procession on my way home from the bus stop” is somewhere between +35 dB and +40 dB (given that such a thing has happened to me exactly once that I remember of), and I'm more confident that ordinary matter is made of atoms than that.

[-][anonymous]13y80

It occurs to me that there are several entirely different types of things which would indicate "Atomic Theory may be Wrong."

1: You look into an Electron Microscope, expecting to see Atoms. You see Infinitely divisible Swiss Cheese spelled out into the shape of the word "Nope."

2: You use an ultra accurate scale, expecting to weigh something at 1.255000001. It weighs 1.255000002. Because the integral weight of the subatoms, subsubatoms, subsubsubatoms etc, causes your measurement to be off.

3: I am inexplicably transported to "Fantas... (read more)

[-]Shmi13y70

Please elucidate the purpose of this question.

[-]DataPacRat13y170

I'm trying to get at least a rough approximation of the upper bound of confidence that LWers place on an idea that seems, to me, to be about as proven as it's possible for an idea to be.

[-][anonymous]13y100

It's funny how many people sidestep the question.

5[anonymous]13y

Why not something like the probability of 2 + 2 = 4? Surely that's more certain than any vague definition of "Atomic Theory of Matter."

[-]DataPacRat13y150

Mainly, because estimating the accuracy of a math statement brings in various philosophical details about the nature of math and numbers, which would likely distract from the focus on theories relating to the nature of our universe. So I went for the most foundational physical theory I could think of... and phrased it rather poorly.

If you have a suggestion on how to un-vague-ify my main post, I'd be happy to read it.

2[anonymous]13y

Except it doesn't -- whether or not we can know those philosophical details are conditional on the accuracy of human hardware, which as far as I can tell is what you want people to estimate.

[-]DataPacRat13y50

Welp - it seems that I definitely managed to phrase my question poorly. So I'll try again:

By 'atomic theory', I'm referring to the century-plus-old theory that ordinary stuff, like trees and pencils and animals, are made out of something like particles, rather than matter being a 'stuff' that you can just keep on dividing into smaller and smaller pieces. I'm referring to the theory that's the foundation of chemistry.

Put yet another way: "Do you think that 'H2O' is a meaningful description of water?"

[-][anonymous]13y100

Seeing as I work every day with individual DNA molecules which behave discretely (as in, one goes into a cell or one doesn't), and on the way to my advisor I walk past a machine that determines the 3D molecular structure of proteins... yeah.

This edifice not being true would rely on truly convoluted laws of the universe that emulate it in minute detail under every circumstance I can think of, but not doing so under some circumstance not yet seen. I am not sure how to quantify that, but I would certainly never plan for it being the case. >99.9? Most of the 0.1% comes from the possibility that I am intensely stupid and do not realize it, not thinking that it could be wrong within the framework of what is already known. Though at that scale the numbers are really hard to calibrate.

1DataPacRat13y

Alright, to try and make calibration easier, how about this thought experiment - which do you think would be more likely: that if you bought a random ticket, you'd then win the grand prize of a 1-in-a-1,000 lottery; or that atomic theory will be proven false? At what point does the odds of the lottery ticket seem to start coming close to the odds of falsifying atomic theory?

0Pavitra13y

I think a more plausible scenario for the atomic theory being wrong would be that the scientific community -- and possibly the scientific method -- is somehow fundamentally borked up. Humans have come up with -- and become strongly confident in -- vast, highly detailed, completely nowhere-remotely-near-true theories before, and it's pretty hard to tell from the inside whether you're the one who won the epistemic lottery. They all think they have excellent reasons for believing they're right.

[-]Manfred13y50

For many of the obvious ways to pose the question, atomic theory is already false - multiparticle states are the real building blocks, and you can do pretty unusual things with them if you try hard enough. I think the most sensible thing to ask about is sudden failure of properties that we normally ascribe to atomic theory, like ratios working in chemical reactions or quantum mechanics predicting NMR spectra. In which case, I'd need said failures to replicate to be as good as the supporting evidence, or propose a simple-ish mechanism, like "we're in ... (read more)

[-]Decius13y40

1-epsilon. It is more likely that the atomic description of the universe is generally accurate (although it does break down at the subatomic level) than that I am answering a question about it.

2DataPacRat13y

In that case - could you offer anything like an order-of-magnitude of how large epsilon is for your answering of such questions? (If I can't get an estimate of epsilon for atomism, I'll be happy for an estimate of epsilon for the estimate... or however many levels it takes to get /some/ estimate.)

[-]prase13y30

99.99998754%.

Actually, I don't know. The number above has been determined by both my credence in the atomic theory and the shape of my keyboard, anchoring and perhaps many other biases; the biases could have driven the number far away from its true value. But I dislike dodging questions about probability and believe that disagreements would be easier to resolve if people shared their probabilities when asked, so I provide an answer which is as good as I can make it.

I believe that there is a useful reformulation of similar questions: how many bits of eviden... (read more)

[-]HalMorris13y30

The idea of assigning a probability to such a thing might be, I think, what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the "Ludic fallacy" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludic_fallacy). Alternatively, as I see it, to do such a thing, we need to start with some sort of paradigm by which we know how to set probabilities and do something useful with them. Poker is a good example, and not coincidentally, "Ludic" is from the Latin ludus, meaning "play, game, sport, pastime." It is no accident that so many introductory examples in statistics... (read more)

5DataPacRat13y

The paradigm I'm currently looking at this is, generally, the accumulation of evidence over long periods. In the year 1800, not even Dalton had published his (wrong) results about the mass of oxygen; there was no particular evidence /to/ believe in the atomic theory.. In 1900, Einstein had yet to publish his work on Brownian motion; there was still a small but reasonable possibility that somebody would come up with a non-atomic theory that made better predictions. In 2000, atomic theory was so settled that few people even bothered calling it a 'theory' anymore. At any given point during those two centuries, a certain amount of evidence would have been collected relating to atomic theory, and it would have been reasonable to have different levels of confidence in it at different times. In the present-day, the possibility that atomic theory is false is about as small a probability as anyone is likely to encounter - so if I can work out ideas that cover probability estimates that small, then it's probably (ahem) safe to assume they'll be able to cover anything with greater probability. Or maybe I'm wrong. In which case I don't know a better way to find out I /am/ wrong than to work through the same thing, and come across an unresolvable difficulty.

3HalMorris13y

Well that's a very commendable attitude, seriously.

[-][anonymous]13y30

How confident are you in the existence of cats?

This is a colossal waste of time.

[-]DataPacRat13y120

If you don't mind the question: How confident are /you/ in the existence of cats?

The reason I ask, is that I'm still trying to train myself to think of probability, evidence, confidence, and similar ideas logarithmically rather than linearly. 10 decibans of confidence means 90% odds, 20 decibans means 99%, 30 means 99.9%, and so on. However, 100% confidence in any proposition translates to an infinite number of decibans - requiring an infinite amount of evidence to achieve. So far, the largest amount of confidence given in the posts here is about 100 decibans... and there is a very large difference between '100 decibans' and 'infinite decibans'. And that difference has some consequences, in terms of edge cases of probability estimation with high-value consequences; which has practical implications in terms of game theory, and thus politics, and thus which actions to choose in certain situations. While the whole exercise may be a waste of time for you, I feel that it isn't for me.

2vi21maobk9vp13y

How much evidence do you have that you can count accurately (or make a corect request to computer and interpret results correctly)? How much evidence that probability theory is a good description of events that seem random? Once you get as much evidence for atomic theory as you have for the weaker of the two claims above, describing your degree of confidence requires more efforts than just naming a number.

[-]pragmatist13y30

I'm still not sure how I'm supposed to interpret this question. If you're asking whether I think "matter is made up of atoms" is an extremely useful working hypothesis for many many scientific purposes, then the answer is obviously "yes" with probability that only negligibly differs from 1. (ETA: Don't ask me how negligibly different, because I couldn't tell you. I am not enough of an ideal Bayesian that I can meaningfully attach probabilities with many significant digits to my beliefs.)

If you're asking whether the fundamental structure... (read more)

1DataPacRat13y

That's the general answer I'm aiming to evoke; I'm trying to get a better idea of just how big that 'negligibly' is.

2pragmatist13y

Like I said in my edit, I can't give you a precise answer, but to narrow it down a bit, I'm comfortable saying that the probability is higher than 1 - 10^(-9).

3[anonymous]13y

Really? What's the probability that a human can even be in an epistemic state that would justify 30 bits of belief?

[-]Richard_Kennaway13y110

What's the probability that a human can even be in an epistemic state that would justify 30 bits of belief?

About the same as the probability that a human can be in a physical state that allows them to walk. Winners of a 100 million-to-one lottery overcome a prior improbability of 10^-8, and presumably are at least as certain they have won, once they have collected, as they were previously expecting to lose, so there's somewhere above 10^16 of updating, 160 decibans, 53 bits. And ordinary people do it. If you're so smart you can't, there's something wrong with your smartness.

What strikes you as implausible about 30 bits of belief? It takes more than 30 bits to single out one individual on this planet.

0HalMorris13y

So all we need is an example of a universe without atoms (corresponding to the example of someone who did win the lottery despite the improbability of doing that) for this analogy to work. I think there are fields of thought in which the best paradigm is that something either is or isn't, and where probabalistic thinking will do no good, and if forced or contrived to seem to work, may do harm (e.g. the models by which Wall Street came up with a plausible -- to some -- argument that CDSs of subprime mortgages could be rated AAA). And there are fields of thought in which the idea that something simply is or isn't is the thing likely to mislead or do harm (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interesting_number where one gets into trouble by thinking a number either is or isn't "interesting"). The "interesting number" business isn't probabalistic either, though there may be some usefulness, in Baysian arguments that treat subjective "levels of certainty" like probabilities.

2Shmi13y

Note that probabilities like that cannot be estimated because they are at the noise level. For example, the odds are about the same that you are delusional and no one asked this question (i.e., the odds are tiny and hard to evaluate).

0DataPacRat13y

What level of confidence is high (or low) enough that you would feel means that something is within the 'noise level'?

0Pavitra13y

Depending on how smart I feel today, anywhere from -10 to 40 decibans. (edit: I remember how log odds work now.)

1RichardHughes13y

Why is it important to quantify that value?

5DataPacRat13y

The most important reason I can think of: the largest number of decibans that's yet been mentioned is 160 (though that's more of a delta, going from -80 to +80 decibans); the highest actual number of decibans is around 100. This gives me reasonably good confidence that if any practical rules-of-thumb involving decibans I come up with can handle, say, from -127 to +127 decibans (easily storable in a single byte), then that should be sufficient to handle just about anything I come across, and I don't have to spend the time and effort trying to extend that rule-of-thumb to 1,000 decibans. I'm also interested in finding out what the /range/ of highest decibans given is. One person said 50; another said 100. This gives an idea of how loosely calibrated even LWers are when dealing with extreme levels of confidences, and suggests that figuring out a decent way /to/ calibrate such confidences is an area worth looking into. An extremely minor reason, but I feel like mentioning it anyway: I'm the one and only DataPacRat, and this feels like a shiny piece of data to collect and hoard even if it doesn't ever turn out to have any practical use.

3RichardHughes13y

"Not all data is productively quantifiable to arbitrary precision." Hoard that, and grow wiser for it.

3DataPacRat13y

Indeed not. In this particular case, can you recommend any better way of finding out what the limits to precision actually are?

1DaFranker13y

I think how confident you can be in the math of your own confidence and the laws of probability, according to your priors of the laws of probability, is pretty much as far down as you can go. Then this confidence prior in the laws of probability lets you apply it to your memory and do conjunction/disjunction math on the many instances of something turning out "correct", so you get a reliability of memory given a certain amount of memory datapoints and a certain reliability of probabilities. Then you kind of keep doing more bayes, building layer after layer relying on the reliability of your own memory and the applicability of this whole process altogether. That seems like an acceptable upper bound to me. And yes, that's probably rather equivalent to saying "What are your priors for Bayes, Occam, laws of probability and your memory all correct and functional? There, that's your upper bound."

0DataPacRat13y

Would you care to offer any estimates of /your/ priors for Bayes, etc? Or what your own inputs or outputs for the overall process you describe might be?

0DaFranker13y

I haven't calculated the longer version yet, but my general impression so far is that I'm around the ~60 deciban mark as my general upper bound for any single piece of knowledge. I'm not sure I'm even capable of calculating the longer version, since I suspect there's a lot more information problems and more advanced math required for calculating things like the probability distributions of causal independence over individually-uncertain memories forged from unreliable causes in the (presumably very complex) causal graph representing all of this and so on.

0RichardHughes13y

I can't. But that sounds like a more useful question!

[-]magfrump13y30

Querying my expectations I find that my expectations of reality aren't at all related to verbal statements like "The Atomic Theory of Matter" even if my verbal centers want to endorse it strongly.

I currently believe that the atomic theory of matter is a descriptive, predictive theory relating to the sorts of objects physicists have categorized and the sorts of tools that exist.

Asking "How confident are you that there are discrete units" feels like asking "how confident are you that jumping on one goomba's head in mario gives you 10... (read more)

[-]Locaha13y20

Q: How confident are you in Newton's law of universal gravitation?

A: Depends on the conditions.

[-][anonymous]13y20

Main evidence: Universal belief (including experts), coherence of theory, directly testable implications that I deal with on a day-to-day basis (fuel cells), lots more directly testable predictions (brownian motion, all the rest of chemistry, thermodynamics, solid and fluid mechanics...)

Let's put it this way, if I encountered the kind of evidence that would be required to cast it into doubt, I'd have to revise my belief in pretty much everything. Cartesian demon level.

Maybe 15 bits? Mostly metauncertainty.

EDIT: I feel profoundly unqualified as a mere human to be tossing around that kind of certainty, but I'm going to leave it.

[-]ikrase13y20

for 'The Epicurean Truth' namely that matter works on simple computable rules and everything actually perceptible to humans is emergent: Certainty with an epsilon-sized crack (connected to sudden doubt of everything whatsoever)

For what you actually asked about: I'd say its almost the same, maybe over a hundred decibans.

[-]RichardHughes13y10

I live my life under the assumption that it is correct, and I do not make allowances in my strategic thinking that it may be false. As for how hard it would be to convince me I was wrong, I am currently sufficiently invested in the atomic theory of matter that I can't think, off-hand, what such evidence would look like. But I presume (hope) that a well-stated falsifiable experiment which showed matter as a continuum would convince me to become curious.

2DataPacRat13y

One viewpoint I've learned from the skeptical community is that individual experiments have very little value - an experiment with a stated p-value of 0.05 actually has more than a 1-in-20 chance of being wrong. Collections of experiments, however, from a whole field of research, that can provide some valuable evidence; for example, 400 different experiments, of which around 370 lean in one direction and 30 in the other, and there's a noticeable trend that the tighter the experiment, the more likely it is to lean in the majority direction. What I'm currently trying to wrestle with is that if there are 400 experiments, then even restating their p-values in terms of logarithmic decibans, you can't /just/ add all that evidence up. At the least, there seems to be a ceiling, based on the a-few-in-a-billion odds of extreme mental disorder. I'm currently wondering if a second-order derivative for evidence might be in order - eg, take decibans as a linear measure and work with a logarithm based on that. Or, perhaps, some other transformation which further reduces the impact of evidence when there's already a lot of it.

2Richard_Kennaway12y

A larger obstacle to adding them up is that 400 experiments are never going to be independent. There will be systematic errors. Ten experiments in ten independent laboratories by ten independent teams, all using the same, unwittingly flawed, method of measuring something, will just give a more precise measurement of a wrong value. How do people conducting meta-analyses deal with this problem? A few Google searches showed the problem being acknowledged, but not what to do about it.

2satt12y

I doubt there's a general solution open to the meta-analyst, since estimating systematic error requires domain-specific knowledge.

2Richard_Kennaway12y

I would expect meta-analysis to require such knowledge anyway, but I don't know if this is what happens in practice. Are meta-analyses customarily done other than by experts in the field?

2satt12y

Ideally a meta-analyst would have domain-specific knowledge, but the process of doing a basic meta-analysis is standardized enough that one can carry it out without such knowledge. One just needs to systematically locate studies, extract effect sizes from them, and find various weighted averages of those effect sizes. Good point. Most meta-analyses are done by people in the field, although I'm not sure whether they're typically experts in the specific phenomenon they're meta-analyzing. Thinking about it, maybe the problem's a simple one: estimating systematic errors is really hard. I've seen it done occasionally for experimental physics papers, where authors can plausibly argue they've managed to pinpoint all possible sources of systematic error and account for them. But an epidemiologist meta-analyzing observational studies generally can't quantify confounding biases and analogous sources of systematic error.

2gwern12y

My own impression has been this as well: if you already understand your basic null-hypothesis testing, a regular meta-analysis isn't that hard to learn how to do. Do you have any materials on epidemiological meta-analyses? I've been thinking of trying to meta-analyze the correlations of lithium in drinking water, but even after a few days of looking through papers and textbooks I still haven't found any good resources on how to handle the problems in epidemiology or population-level correlations.

2satt12y

Not to hand. But (as you've found) I doubt they'd tell you what you want to know, anyway. The problems aren't special epidemiological phenomena but generic problems of causal inference. They just bite harder in epidemiology because (1) background theory isn't as good at pinpointing relevant causal factors and (2) controlled experiments are harder to do in epidemiology. If I were in your situation, I'd probably try running a sensitivity analysis. Specifically, I'd think of plausible ways confounding would've occurred, guesstimate a probability distribution for each possible form of confounding, then do Monte Carlo simulations using those probability distributions to estimate the probability distribution of the systematic error from confounding. This isn't usually that satisfactory, since it's a lot of work and the result often depends on arsepulls. But it's hard to do better. There are philosophers of causality out there (like this guy) who work on rigorous methods for inferring causes from observational data, but as far as I know those methods require pretty strong & fiddly assumptions. (IlyaShpitser can probably go into more detail about these methods.) They also can't do things like magically turn a population-level correlation into an individual-level correlation, so I'd guess you're SOL there.

2gwern12y

I've found that there's always a lot of field-specific tricks; it's one of those things I really was hoping to find. Yeah, that's not worth bothering with. The really frustrating thing about the lithium-in-drinking-water correlation is that it would be very easy to do a controlled experiment. Dump some lithium into some randomly chosen county's water treatment plants to bring it up to the high end of 'safe' natural variation, come back a year later and ask the government for suicide & crime rates, see if they fell; repeat n times; and you're done. I'm interested for generic utilitarian reasons, so I'd be fine with a population-level correlation.

0satt12y

Hmm. Based on the epidemiology papers I've skimmed through over the years, there don't seem to be any killer tricks. The usual procedure for non-experimental papers seems to be to pick a few variables out of thin air that sound like they might be confounders, measure them, and then toss them into a regression alongside the variables one actually cares about. (Sometimes matching is used instead of regression but the idea is similar.) Still, it's quite possible I'm only drawing a blank because I'm not an epidemiologist and I haven't picked up enough tacit knowledge of useful analysis tricks. Flicking through papers doesn't actually make me an expert. True. Even though doing experiments is harder in general in epidemiology, that's a poor excuse for not doing the easy experiments. Ah, I see. I misunderstood your earlier comment as being a complaint about population-level correlations. I'm not sure which variables you're looking for (population-level) correlations among, but my usual procedure for finding correlations is mashing keywords into Google Scholar until I find papers with estimates of the correlations I want. (For this comment, I searched for "smoking IQ conscientiousness correlation" without the quotes, to give an example.) Then I just reuse those numbers for whatever analysis I'd like to do. This is risky because two variables can correlate differently in different populations. To reduce that risk I try to use the estimate from the population most similar to the population I have in mind, or I try estimating the correlation myself in a public use dataset that happens to include both variables and the population I want.

0gwern12y

You never try to meta-analyze them with perhaps a state or country moderator?

0satt12y

I misunderstood you again; for some reason I got it into my head that you were asking about getting a point estimate of a secondary correlation that enters (as a nuisance parameter) into a meta-analysis of some primary quantity. Yeah, if I were interested in a population-level correlation in its own right I might of course try meta-analyzing it with moderators like state or country.

[-]faul_sname13y10

Somewhere between 0 decibans and 50 decibans, depending on the question you are actually trying to ask. If you're asking "Is there some way to interpret QM equations without invoking the concept of atoms," I'd give that about 50/50, because I don't actually know QM and I could see that going either way. If your question is instead "How confident are you that you will continue to make observations consistent with atomic theory for the rest of your life," I'm quite confident that I won't see anything obviously falsifying the existence of,... (read more)

2DataPacRat13y

I'm not trying to deal with the complications of quantum mechanics; and I'm not trying to ask a trick question. (I'm just nowhere near as good at expressing myself as I wish I was.) At the end of your first paragraph, you come close to answering my question - all I'm hoping is to get more of a quantification of how confident you are

5faul_sname13y

When answering a question like that, most of my uncertainty is uncertainty about my interpretation of the question rather than my expectations about the world. I expect my cells to continue functioning and my computer to continue working (p> 80 decibans and 70 decibans respectively), if I mix HCl and NaOH I still expect to get saltwater (p > 60 decibans), and if I shoot a beam of ionized Hydrogen atoms through a magnetic field in a vaccuum, I expect that the beam will curve with a specific radius. If I replace the ionized Hydrogen with ionized Lithium and keep all other factors the same, I expect that radius to approximately seven times that of the beam ofHydrogen atoms (with a few atoms curving at a radius of 6 times that of the Hydrogen if they're some Lithium-6 mixed in) (p > 60 decibans). I expect nuclear fission to continue working, and so expect that some atoms will be divisible into multiple smaller atoms, though that manifests as a belief that nuclear power plants will keep working (p > 60 decibans). On the other hand, I expect that I understand your question, but not with anywhere near the level of certainty as I have that I will continue to see the physical processes above operating as I've observed them to operate in the past. And even with you saying it's not a trick question, I'm more certain that the predictions made by atomic theory will provide an accurate enough description of reality for my purposes than that this isn't a trick question. And I'm almost positive this isn't a trick question.

4DataPacRat13y

That's about as ideal a response as I could ask for; thank you kindly for taking the time to write it out.

[-]DuncanS13y10

Since you're trying to put numbers on something which many of us regard as being certainly true, I'll take the liberty of slightly rephrasing your question.

How much confidence do I place in the scientific theory that ordinary matter is not infinitely divisible? In other words, that it is not true that no matter how small an amount of water I have, I can make a smaller amount by dividing it?

I am (informally) quite certain that water is not infinitely subdivisible. I don't think it's that useful an activity for me to try to put numbers on it, though. The pro... (read more)

[-]Viliam_Bur13y10

To not avoid the question, I say 99.9999%. And while saying this, I also note that I am not really good at estimating probabilities with this preciseness.

By the way, you should make a poll. With options e.g. "less than 99%", "99%", "99.9%" ... "99.9999999%", "more than "99.9999999%", "1".

0DataPacRat13y

Now that I've gotten an initial range of estimates here - from around 30 decibans (10 bits, 1 in a thousand) to a hundred decibans (33 bits, 1 in 10 billion), I just might do something along those lines... or maybe I'll try drafting out a new post (maybe even for Main) that doesn't have all the flaws of this one, such as 'How confident can you be?', including such a poll.

[-]iDante13y10

I'm a little confused by this question. In my experience, atomic theory always refers to atoms. I think you're really asking whether quarks and such are divisible. I'm confident that there is no substructure to elementary particles, but I won't give a number.

0DataPacRat13y

I did, indeed, phrase the question poorly. Yes, I'm asking about the atomic theory referring to atoms (whatever they themselves may be made of).

0iDante13y

Oh. That one is so close to 1 that there's no use even discussing it anymore.

4DataPacRat13y

If that's how you feel... then when would you say that confidence in atomic theory /got/ close enough to 1 that there was no more use in discussing it?

[-]The Dao of Bayes13y00

"All the results of atomic theory are down to random chance, and it's a useless model" [~0%]

"Atomic theory is the absolute best possible model for reality, and handles all edge cases ideally" [~0%]

I'd say 40 decibans is my minimum credence for ANY major established theory, simply due to the possibility of procedural error or unknown factors in any attempted disproof. i.e. I would assume that there's been at LEAST 10,000 erroneous results that purported to disprove the theory.

Alternately, if we assume there are at least a million scienti... (read more)

[-]buybuydandavis13y00

How much confidence do you place in the scientific theory that ordinary matter is made of discrete units, or 'atoms', as opposed to being infinitely divisible?

Per Korzybski, I'd say that whatever you say matter is, it is not. Modeling matter as coming in discrete configurations works quite well, though we've seen that there are exceptions where the discrete configurations can be reconfigured if properly physically perturbed. I wouldn't be surprised if there are tons more stable configurations than we've seen or created so far, and even some that no longer model well as "discrete".

[+]ChristianKl13y-50

LESSWRONG
LW

LESSWRONG
LW

-2

How confident are you in the Atomic Theory of Matter?

-2

-2