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.
You are way overconfident in your own sanity. What proportion of humans experience vivid, detailed hallucinations on a regular basis? (not counting dreams)
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.
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...
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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 ...
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.
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...
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...
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.
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...
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.
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...
Q: How confident are you in Newton's law of universal gravitation?
A: Depends on the conditions.
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.
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.
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.
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,...
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...
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".
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.
"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...
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".
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?
More than 50%? 90%? 99%? 99.9%? 99.99%? 99.999%? More? If so, how much more? (If describing your answer in percentages is cumbersome, then feel free to use the logarithmic scale of decibans, where 10 decibans corresponds to 90% confidence, 20 to 99%, 30 to 99.9%, etc.)
This question freely acknowledges that there are aspects of physics which the atomic theory does not directly cover, such as conditions of extremely high energy. This question is primarily concerned with that portion of physics in which the atomic theory makes testable predictions.
This question also freely acknowledges that its current phrasing and presentation may not be the best possible to elicit answers from the LessWrong community, and will be happy to accept suggestions for improvement.
Edit: By 'atomic theory', this question refers to the century-plus-old theory. A reasonably accurate rewording is: "Do you believe 'H2O' is a meaningful description of water?".