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Davey Morse

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the scientific community sometimes overlooks theories before they are proven. i’m curious if there are patterns to this ignorance, specifically regarding "scale confusion."

take these examples:

special relativity: required accepting that at high speeds, length and time dilate. we assumed fast-moving light operates like everyday objects.
helio-centrism: required accepting that stars are far enough away that their patterns don't shift from a moving earth. we assumed stars couldn't be so much farther than the sun.
evolution: required accepting that life has existed for millions of years. we assumed it couldn't have gone on for more than a few thousand.

it seems a major source of scientific delay is an aversion to very big or very small scales. we are slow to admit that on scales we don't yet perceive, things might be much weirder than we know. this confusion likely delayed other breakthroughs like germ theory, tectonic plates, quantum mechanics, and llm scaling laws.

is scale confusion truly this prominent, or am i cherrypicking? of course there are other reasons that better scientific models get delayed (social dogma, complexity, religion), but if aversion to scale is real, what models of reality are we prematurely rejecting today?

also curious how current tools for measurement (microscopes/telescopes/compute clusters) affect this bias/our reach

6DanielW7mo

I don't think this is true of the examples you gave. The establishment of astronomy took heliocentrism very seriously, the split was with political communities not with science communities. It took a while to have good enough observational evidence of orbits to strongly support heliocentrism, but once we had those observations from Gallileo and Kepler, their arguments were largely accepted by contemporary scientists. Evolution by natural selection was also pretty much universally accepted by the scientific community when we had strong enough evidence. There were a bunch of prior ideas about how speciation/evolution occurred (most notably Lamarkian evolution), within Darwin's life time, fossil evidence had been collected and examined to demonstrate evolution by natural selection and his views were pretty much universally adopted by the scientific community. Special relativity was a lot harder experimentally, but within a couple years of Einstein's initial publication, it also had wide spread acceptance though disputed experimental results meant it took a couple decades before the evidence was universally overwhelming. There certainly is a delay, it is easier to come up with a theory than provide evidence for it. Initial proposals must be evaluated, critiqued and rigorously tested. The larger the implication of a theory and the more their are plausible alternative hypotheses, the longer it takes to have enough evidence to strongly prefer one theory over another.

1Davey Morse6mo

I agree that theories get accepted once there's sufficient evidence for them. But the amount of evidence required... the delay, as you say, between an evidenced proposal for a theory and it's acceptance (both in scientific and mainstream communities)... my question is whether this threshold is higher or delay is greater when the scale at which the theory operates is enormous or tiny. And so I wonder whether there was more skepticism of evolution, relativity, heliocentrism because of bias against the idea that laws are different at different scales. Before these theories were accepted in the mainstream, people broadly believed the earth was younger, stars were closer, the earth was younger, and that there was no way that light could have a speed because it would need to be too fast. It's hard for me to believe that these fundamental biases against extremity would not have delayed these theories' engagement and acceptance.

Mainstream among scientists was different from political communities. Scientists didn't have the same expectations (which isn't to say they never do or didn't have expectations of their own).

>my question is whether this threshold is higher or delay is greater when the scale at which the theory operates is enormous or tiny.

As I said, the larger the implications of a theory, the more interwoven and difficult to test its implications, the harder it is to rule out alternative explanations

>there was no way that light could have a speed because it would ne... (read more)

Davey Morse's Shortform

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Davey Morse's Shortform

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