It turns out that the real story of experimental confirmations of Einstein's theory is a little more complicated and a little more interesting than the version Eliezer alludes to in this post and the prequel, Einstein's arrogance.
In particular, if (counterfactually) experimental measurements of light bending planned between 1911 and 1915 had succeeded they would have falsified the predictions that Einstein had on record at that time, which he only corrected after 1915. See Collins' The Golem for details or this account.
And of course the new theory had to obey Special Relativity
Eer... no. It had to reduce to special relativity in certain special cases and have it as approximate in far more, and locally approximate in even more.
Today's post, Einstein's Speed was originally published on 21 May 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Albert was unusually good at finding the right theory in the presence of only a small amount of experimental evidence. Even more unusually, he admitted it - he claimed to know the theory was right, even in advance of the public proof. It's possible to arrive at the truth by thinking great high-minded thoughts of the sort that Science does not trust you to think, but it's a lot harder than arriving at the truth in the presence of overwhelming evidence.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Faster Than Science, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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