Part of it is that more complicated interactions tend to create instabilities: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/384910/can-einstein-hilbert-action-be-derived-from-symmetry-considerations/385024#385024
Kotlopou
Karma: 38
Karl Popper, meet the Hydra
The history of light
[LINK] Solving scurvy through deus ex machina: How a scientific theory is born
For linkposts, is self-promotion frowned upon? I have written a post that I believe would be interesting to readers here, but it’s on Substack (free and with no intention of paywalling!). Can I create a linkpost for it?
Why doesn’t this apply to Stokes total aether drag theory? George Gabriel Stokes knew about a number of experiments that tried to detect the aether wind and failed, and he made a model where the aether behaved like a non-Newtonian fluid: fluid without viscosity at low speeds (such as the Earth’s), but solid at high frequencies. That way, it could host high-frequency light waves while posing no resistance to ordinary moving objects, and moving objects would drag light along with their movement.
The theory came out in 1845, in 1851 Fizeau measured the speed of light in moving water and found that the water didn’t drag the light with its full speed.
What happened here (in your language) is that this theory had N bits of length and was based on N+ε bits of evidence, and the new experiment disproved it. I don’t see anything in this post that differentiates between Stokes and Einstein, except for the hindsight that Einstein’s theory works. The key sentence is:
“how likely is it that Einstein would have exactly enough observational evidence to raise General Relativity to the level of his attention, but only justify assigning it a 55% probability?”
For most theories, this is exactly what happens. Based on the history of GR we can see that was not the case there, but you can’t just state that a priori, because GR is an outlier here, an outlier that requires explanation. Does this arrogance apply to the expectation of no neutrino oscillations? To the nonexistence of the Poisson/Arago spot? Why not?
I have two separate replies to this:
First of all, I have also seen the phenomenon of people getting unhelpfully attached to their theories. I’m not quite clear on whether you view Kuhnian paradigms as a step forward from that or a step backward—I guess that the collaborative environment you would prefer is something like what Kuhn calls a paradigm?
Second, I have utterly failed in my attempt to communicate. This post is about the need for digressions in science, and yet the very first comment speaks of “crucial time on task”. Compared to most of LW, I’m unconvinced of the imminent need for aligning a super-powerful AI, but if such a task were granted, it would be extremely broad—certainly broader than detecting gravitational waves or solving the structure of biomolecules. Even such tasks require following detours far away from the direct area of study (e.g. LIGO and raven protection). For a task as broad as figuring out a moral code for machine intelligence compatible with human values, plus a way to enforce it starting from the current geopolitical situation, practically any knowledge-seeking activity would be “on task”.