= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
CellBioGuy comments on How confident are you in the Atomic Theory of Matter? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (80)
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.
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?
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.