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It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. I know people who are nuclear scientists at LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal. The experi

• dundarious 4y ago
  "Exciting" for individuals within the field often does not translate to "exciting" for everyone else. It's quite reasonable to think there's a good chance this is not the beginning of a "practical for energy generation" fusion revolution. It is very interesting, but in the same way that advances in particle physics are interesting.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dundarious 4y ago
    An example of the context in which I want to tamper excitement comes from a post by a journalist writing for the FT, an outlet that is (relative to its peers) usually quite matter-of-fact: https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/1602011888652632064 https://twitter.com/thomas_m_wilson/status/16020118886526320... > SCOOP: Net energy gain in a fusion reaction has been a holy grail in science for decades. Now I’m told US scientists have done it. A massive breakthrough with revolutionary potential for clean power. US Energy Secretary to hold a press conference Tuesday: https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589dc7?shareType=nongift https://www.ft.com/content/4b6f0fab-66ef-4e33-adec-cfc345589... Instead of particle physics, perhaps a better comparison would be to quantum computing "breakthroughs" that come out from time to time. Within the field I'm sure there are breakthroughs that inch us closer to something useful (useful in the way it is described in these articles, solving currently unsolvable problems, etc.), sure, but we are so far away from something useful that these inches are ultimately quite underwhelming to the general public (people like me). By all means, I will occasionally read and enjoy great science reporting on these topics, but I have been conditioned to massively downplay the general significance of such news, and I think it's quite well justified, and not mere cynicism (cast as a negative).
    • dundarious 4y ago
      "edit": I meant temper, of course
• squokko 4y ago
  I think it's just the difference in expectations between scientists and laypeople. "Major fusion breakthrough" to a scientist could mean one step out of 200, over 3 decades, towards functional fusion power. Scientists understand the long arc of progress. But these labs need to market to the public as well who invariably end up expecting a SimCity Fusion Power Plant within 18 months.
  • wolverine876 4y ago
    Many on HN have the same response to many things in every domain, not just research.
    • xbmcuser 4y ago
      Yeah its the same here about most new technology like ai and improvement in solar and battery technology. One thing I have noticed is that some of the most vocal people have formed their opinions years ago and now they are not aware or ignore all the changes/improvements that have occured since.
      • NicoJuicy 4y ago
        That's not completely true, but has a lot of truth in it. Everyone formed their opinion about eg. Blockchain a long time ago. But they do admit that eg. Gpt-3 is pretty advanced, but has it's own flaws.
    • Moissanite 4y ago
      On fusion energy and battery technology I see plenty of cynicism, but given the history of wildly over-stated "advances" in both fields I think people are justified in leaning towards pessimism.
      • ethanbond 4y ago
        The reality of course falls short of the most optimistic projections, but e.g. for batteries: look around! Wealthy countries at least are now full of little gadgets that couldn't have existed even a few years ago due to the battery demands. A walk down any street in NYC you'll see probably 5-8 different personal transportation systems that are pretty close to sci-fi.
• gumboza 4y ago
  To an external non-technical observer, this is about as exciting as me hitting a clean compile in the scale of things. It really makes me happy but no one else cares until the product arrives. I'm excited for both for reference.
• underscore_ku 4y ago
• wolverine876 4y ago
  What I encourage people to do, and what I was encouraged to do by a professor, is to find the value in things. Yes the thing, any thing, has great flaws, risks, is an imperfect match, etc. That goes without saying, and is is in some respects pointless to say - we can stay in place without going through the effort of researching something. It's the value in things, and finding that value, that moves us forward.
  • butterfi 4y ago
    I try to live my life this way. People think I’m an optimist, but really I think the world is mostly BS and I try to acknowledge the good things. It works for me.
• eindiran 4y ago
  It's not reflexive-contrarianism as such; it's that the science press has historically been so, so bad that cynicism is the only healthy response. Think of the last 5 things you've seen in the science press: which ones were overemphasized? Which ones were exaggerated to the point that they didn't reflect anything meaningful about the actual result? And thinking back on the press releases over the years, what percentage of what you've read end up having an actual effect on the world? Add to that the fact that this is about fusion breakthroughs, something that has been wrought with complete disinformation by the science press since the late 1940s. Of course people here are going to be cynical about it.
• root_axis 4y ago
  Reflexive contrarianism is far healthier than blind credulity. Skepticism should be the default state, especially for claims of amazing scientific breakthroughs.
  • rogerkirkness 4y ago
    The older I get the more I think it's just counter signaling that one is smarter than whoever did this work, which is almost certainly not the case.
    • spoils19 4y ago
      • govg 4y ago
        The average HN reader who is probably a generic software engineer in their 20s/30s will know more about nuclear fusion than scientists at LLNL?
        • Moissanite 4y ago
          Listen man, remembering the names of all these JavaScript frameworks is hard!
        • JimtheCoder 4y ago
          They think they do, but don't...I think that's the point that's trying to be made here
      • kelnos 4y ago
        That's a pretty arrogant take based on zero actual evidence. When "in my experience" is "randoms on the internet who I've never met and occasionally argue with online", I don't think we can draw many conclusions.
      • teawrecks 4y ago
        The average HN reader strikes me as someone who can talk big, spout buzzwords, and play skeptic, but make them actually solve something and they crumble instantly. Maybe the average HN reader is smarter than the average reddit reader (very slightly if at all), but they're not more useful than someone who actually did work and shared it publicly.
• panzagl 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians No it's not.
  • chmod775 4y ago
    This made me chuckle.
  • dwsjoquist 4y ago
    You just made my day...
  • jonathanoberg 4y ago
    Yes it is.
    • jonathanoberg 4y ago
      No, it isn't Yes, it is. You just contradicted me No, I didn't Yes, you did No, no, no You did just then That's ludicrous Oh, this is futile No, it isn't I came in here for a good argument No, you didn't. You came in here for an argument Well, argument isn't the same as contradiction Can be
      • doctor_eval 4y ago
        "An argument is a connected series of statements intended to form a proposition. Contradiction is merely the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says" "No it isn't!"
        • dawkins 4y ago
          Argument - Monty Python https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohDB5gbtaEQ
        • wiredfool 4y ago
          I’ve had enough of this.
• atty 4y ago
  I agree with the spirit of your comment, and I am extremely excited by these results. However, I think the history of fusion has showed us that the cynics have had a much better track record than the fusion optimists, haha. My very uninformed opinion (nuclear physicist by training, but not specialized in fusion, lasers, or plasma physics) is that we’re still 20 years (haha) away from fusion energy making its way into the power grid. And that is assuming this result (or other things, like the relative instability of global energy markets lately) causes an increase in funding for the field so that they can solve all the pesky engineering issues related to efficiency, reactor lifespan, reliability, cycling speed, etc.
  • PicassoCTs 4y ago
    Also this assumes we get 20 years and the science budget will not be eaten by emerging endless crisis and wars.
    • scottLobster 4y ago
      To be fair, fusion technology is a strategic imperative. The first nation to master it will quickly enjoy defacto Energy independence. Given that many of the crises will likely be energy-eccentric, we may see more investment in the space rather than less, especially if visible progress is being made.
      • atty 4y ago
        I think I’d switch that from “quickly” to “eventually”, or “have a head start to” - we could get grid independence “relatively” quickly if the government subsidized it (I highly doubt first Gen fusion competes with natural gas or solar cost-wise), but a large amount of energy is used in transportation, home heating, etc.. Until those become fully electrified you’re still stuck in the fossil fuel economy.
        • scottLobster 4y ago
          True, I meant "quickly" on a relative scale. One advantage the 1st gen fusions would have is immunity to the supply shocks of fossil fuels and the intermittency of solar/wind. Plus we have workable electric vehicles and every home that has fossil-fuel powered heat by definition has a connection to the electric grid. It wouldn't happen overnight, but I can think of few things that would kickstart the electrification of everything better than functional fusion power plants.
• jeffparsons 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. What could be done about that aside from expecting people to just... be better? I think the shape of these forums induces those kinds of comments, even if the community and moderators make a real effort to uphold higher standards. And I think if I encountered the same people in a different kind of forum then I might have a higher quality conversation. Heck, my own comments would probably be a lot more constructive! Real world example of what I'm thinking: I have a neighbor over one fence who has very different political views to mine. We have perfectly civil conversations in which we're both actually really engaged and trying to understand each others' perspectives and experiences, and not just keeping the peace by avoiding difficult topics. It feels like effort we put into the conversation is rewarded. I can't shake the idea that there might be "one weird trick" (okay, maybe a handful used together) that could make it more rewarding to put more effort into online conversations on forums like Hacker News or Reddit. One I've wanted to try for a while is to recreate something along the lines of Slashdot's moderation system, but with room for a meta-conversation to take place in "moderation space" (in which all community members could participate) and for there to be opportunities for people to refine their comments in response to feedback — and for doing so to be the norm. Maybe it's not that simple. That's okay, too. But I've seen different moderation strategies around the web produce very different results, so it seems to me that there should be plenty of room for experimentation, and a lot to learn from doing so.
  • inanutshellus 4y ago
    Your conversation with your neighbor has no meta-conversation going on. Online discussions "between two people" merely mimic a conversation so the audience (of potentially thousands+ of people) can learn and be swayed. Online conversations are inherently broadcast so the stakes are too high to acquiesce or make concessions for whomever's willing to actually take the bait and engage on "important" topics.
    • jeffparsons 4y ago
      That's a good point. I guess I hadn't really thought about how performative discussions on public forums are. Maybe embracing that more deliberately somehow could produce a worthwhile difference?
• _ea1k 4y ago
  I'm not sure when it happened, but this place has become a lot less inquisitive and a lot more dark in recent times. Possibly its correlated with growth, but it feels like something else.
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    Think it's correlated with growth. I've seen significant post-pandemic degradation on all major social media platforms I use (mostly here & Twitter), along with large increases in volume.
• sbierwagen 4y ago
• senko 4y ago
  > It’s insane how much cynicism I’m seeing here. [..] This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. The problem is that fusion "breakthroughs" have been hyped by the press for many decades now. After a few such articles gets people excited and then reality crushes the hype, people learn to dismiss every new story as yet another inconsequential thing blown out of proportion. I'm commenting about the coverage of fusion in general, not about this particular thing. If it is actually a big deal, great!
  • cpleppert 4y ago
    It isn't just hyped; popular reporting on fusion power hasn't been very accurate. It doesn't help fusion power that things like this are trumpeted as a breakthrough when the reality is that the INF was never was a viable way to generate power in first place.
• cpleppert 4y ago
  I don't believe its contrarianism. Sure, its an interesting science experiment but it has no viable way to generate power in any way. The lasers needs to be more efficient by a factor of 100x in the best case scenario(it depends on the specifics of how they calculate net gain). Then you probably need to increase that by another factor of 2-5x even assuming you have a way to convert that thermal energy to electricity. No one has any idea how that would ever be viable; other fusion alternatives at least have a way to accomplish thermal transfer from the reactor. Then you somehow have to figure out how to build a financially viable power plant. Oh, by the way, the lasers need to fire 1000x more for that. No one has any idea how that would work either. There is a reason no one but a national lab interested in fusion reactions with massive financial resources has done this before; its interesting but doesn't produce any kind of viable power source. Edit: The INF was proposed and designed as means to ensure the viabilty of the nuclear stockpile. It and the French equivalent were never understood as somehow prototyping a fusion power plant for the reasons laid out above. The press reporting here is just not accurate.
• stuckinhell 4y ago
  People have been burned time and time again by scientists over hyping stuff in the last 10 years, then combine that with the replication failures over nearly every single scientific field. Then look at the extreme amount of business fraud in the last 10 years with places like Theranos and FTX Hackernews is not infested with reflexive contrarians. Hackernews has healthy amounts of skepticism and doubt. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
  • yummypaint 4y ago
    When people use the word "reflexive," they're talking about things like conflating business hype designed to attract publicity and VC capital with a press release for a major scientific paper from NIF. I don't think it's unreasonable for HN to hold itself to an understanding of these things. If you actually want to critically examine evidence then you must necessarily read the paper before posting.
    • stuckinhell 4y ago
      "reflexive contrarians" in the context here was being used a perojative rhetorical trick to broadly dismiss valid doubts people have about this research.
      • yummypaint 4y ago
        What specific issue do you have with the methodology and why? What specific scientific criticism do you claim is being silenced? Merely feeling strongly about this work contributes nothing to the discussion.
    • whimsicalism 4y ago
      Bodied, and deservedly so. Bringing FTX into a discussion of nuclear fusion to justify skepticism is parody-worthy.
      • stuckinhell 4y ago
        It's an example of latest in many high profile scams. If you think it's parody that's fine, but you cannot deny the public mood is souring on big promises with out big results. FTX is simply the latest in a series of media empowered EXTREMELY high profile scams. You can easily put a thousand other different high profile companies or claims in there.
• gaucheries 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians hey, at least all of them are highly educated and extremely correct about things. read about it on their blogs. (sarcasm enabled for this reply)
  • gaucheries 4y ago
    downvoters of this comment, be sure to leave a link to your blog, too
• catach 4y ago
  I do not think I can meaningfully increase my levels of credulity (nor my skepticism). I strive to communicate my thoughts accurately. Given those two points, how is it not healthy?
• rukuu001 4y ago
  Seeing headlines like this every year or so will do that to you
• honeybadger1 4y ago
  It's mostly British folks in those comments as well. If you are looking at real estate in Britain, now you know what you are dealing with.
• wpietri 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. I think that's true. But I also think there is a lot in the way of breathless PR around science topics both from university press offices and lower-end science news outlets. Especially around fusion, which has been 20 years away for a lifetime. So I get why people are going to be particularly skeptical.
• throwawaymaths 4y ago
  Look if a scientist at LLNL is excited about it, then there's a conflict of interest here. The fact of the matter is that there is such a high likelihood that inertial confinement is a dead end, because as far as I can tell there is not a realistic plan to harvest the produced energy, which at least, some of the other designs do. The bar is literally higher in other branches of fusion research (and they too are getting called to task for reporting plasma q values instead of estimated plausible total yields). Until someone starts at least building a model of how to collect this energy high levels of skepticism are warranted.
  • hardtke 4y ago
    Agree with the first sentence. I worked at a couple of national labs and the number one priority is to keep the lab open by justifying the flagship project. NIF has a long history of disappointments so it's nice to see some success, but it still isn't clear building this thing was justified. The main rationale during the planning stages was "stockpile stewardship" which loosely translate into "making jobs for nuclear weapons scientists even though we aren't building any."
• politician 4y ago
  > “Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the exact yield is still being determined and we can’t confirm that it is over the threshold at this time,” it said. “That analysis is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that process is complete would be inaccurate.” From the article!!!
• happytiger 4y ago
  Engineers tend to have a problem solving demeanor towards novelty, which is excellent for finding the problem with things. Showing a room full of problem solvers an unfinished problem that lacks critical supporting evidence will no doubt elicit a general response in the skeptical-to-cynical range. I would respectfully argue that is is a health and normal response given the audience, and should be an expected bias on HN. This is a “show me the evidence don’t tell me about the possibilities” crowd. I for one and deeply excited if the data proves out, but my bias is “wait and see.” This could be a massive leap towards proof it will work.
  • SantalBlush 4y ago
    This could pass as satire of a Hacker News comment.
• qayxc 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. I don't know. Looking closely at the article reveals that the researchers achieved 1.2x energy gain from the lasers, which are about 1% efficient. Given the SOTA for such lasers is closer to 20% efficiency, this means that they achieved about 60% of break-even. But that's energy, no electricity. Even with the best current methods, about 60% efficiency is the best we can hope for in terms of getting actual electricity from this. So in practical terms they achieved 30% of break-even. Is that good progress? I'd say so, for sure. Is this a breakthrough? I don't know, especially since the article itself says the data is still being analysed and the actual results aren't published yet. 95% of the article is just fluff about the potential and quoting 3rd parties who celebrate a result that hasn't even been officially confirmed yet. So, no I don't think it's cynicism, I don't think it's contrarianism, and I do think it's VERY healthy to approach sensationalist headlines with a level-headed and down to Earth attitude instead.
  • DesiLurker 4y ago
    > But that's energy, no electricity as far as fusion viability is concerned net energy (over whats put in) is enough. the whole electricity is moving the goal post because there are plenty of other sources that primarily produce heat. Now regarding efficiency of laser itself, sure they are inefficient but from just nuclear fusion pov net energy gain is a significant milestone in itself. lasers can get incrementally more efficient, at least there was not incentive to make them super efficient so far & there are no known fundamental problems with making them efficient.
    • Robotbeat 4y ago
      Lasers can get over 50% efficient (although these are specialized types). It’s silly to blame a facility not designed for power production for using inefficient lasers. This is an important and necessary step to getting resources to go further. Imagine how dumb it would’ve been to build a fusion power plant before we could even do 1.2x energy gain. A complete waste of resources.
    • qayxc 4y ago
• intrasight 4y ago
  > The experiment actually created more energy than expected and damaged the sensors. Who else in their minds eye see smoke and sparks in the experimental facility and control room, and scientists and engineer wooping with joy ;)
• twblalock 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. The initial flood of comments is always like that, because they are low-effort dismissals. The first 5 comments on every story could probably be auto-flagged. The better stuff usually rises to the top eventually.
• VoodooJuJu 4y ago
  We're hackers, engineers. We poke around for problems before there are problems and we pry open the black box to make sure it's not just filled with Bullshit. If you want to unquestioningly lap up everything that's offered to you, then I've got some ocean-front property in Afghanistan I'd like to sell you.
  • torben-friis 4y ago
    That’s definitely how many people here see themselves, but excessive scepticism can also be a problem, something which is overlooked by this crowd. If you don’t push and help the many small steps that come before the big leap, many big leaps will never become feasible.
    • scottLobster 4y ago
      Over-hyping the small steps as big leaps is the problem. If the scientifically literate people here are sick of it, imagine what the voting public thinks.
      • torben-friis 4y ago
        “First time ind history fusion releases more energy that is put in” is a big leap. The fact that it’s still a technology in its infancy and decades away from actual use doesn’t make it any less impressive.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    So the two options are to believe everything unquestionably or be suspicious/cynical about all new announcements.
• WheelsAtLarge 4y ago
  Part of it is that we read about "breakthroughs" in diverse fields only to see nothing come of them. Past experience creates valid doubt. Also, as exciting as this might be, we are nowhere near a practical application. Overall, I'm glad there are still points of excitement and we haven't come to a halt.
• PaulHoule 4y ago
  Lotsa reasons. (1) We are used to the same "news" story being cycled again and again. I think a year ago we heard about a previous breakthrough in ignition. When I hear a story like this my first instinct is that the old story has been recycled and I'm not sure that there is any actual news. A few months back it was announced that scientists had discovered a black hole that was nearest to the earth and it still gets posted to HN which makes me wonder if they discovered a closer one. (2) For a while there have been two parallel tracks, one of very slow development efforts at LLNL and IETF which might yield a power source in 50 years and another about firms from Lockheed Martin to scrappy startups who are promising to build a "Mr Fusion" tomorrow. There are still memories of the Pons & Fleischman affair from the 1980s and a strange subculture of LENR activists who claim they will sell you a fusion power source today. One could easily assume "fusion is the new blockchain" in this climate (3) Fusion research has proceeded with no direct line to a practical power source for a long time, the sharpest critique you hear is "the point of the NIF is to do subthreshold tests of nuclear weapons, not develop a power source" (4) Fusion is really hard. They might have to get the energy output up 100 times and increase the shot rate 500,000 times to build a real power source, even if 1-3 aren't enough to make you dismiss the whole thing. People will point out that ignition is a big threshold and it might not be so hard to increase the energy output from here out, but we have a long ways to go.
  • latchkey 4y ago
    I'm just glad these scientists are working on something other than nuclear bombs.
    • zargon 4y ago
      The entire point of LLNL is to study nuclear bombs.
      • PaulHoule 4y ago
        The original point of LLNL was to develop nuclear bombs. There is such as thing as "mission creep", also the challenge of maintaining the ability to develop bombs in the future if we need to.
• bowsamic 4y ago
  I’m a physicist and it’s absurd how much career concerns push us to overhype even the most incremental research effort. I’m not surprised the public are sceptical
• kolbe 4y ago
  Maybe we paid attention when our parents told us the tale of the Boy Who Cried Wolf.
• talkingtab 4y ago
  HN comments are not thinking, doing anything, or building something. It is a place where you gain attention and karma not from some constructive act. People post constructive things, then commenters vie for attention. If you look at threads, the top "comment" on them is something about a completely different topic. And then they mostly go downhill. Hacker News is a good source for interesting posts and idea. The comments are mostly worthwhile for watching how a social machine produces very weird stuff. It is not the people who are contrarians, it a function of the machine. Zeynep Tufekci talked about how twitter affords outrage and the Arab Spring, but did not afford a way to do anything constructive with that outrage. (Twitter and Tear Gas, available as a pdf). HN commenting system affords .... what you see here.
• lazzlazzlazz 4y ago
  Hacker News is absolutely totally broken with cynicism. It has been getting worse for years now.
• pavon 4y ago
  I agree that the discussion generated from this article is not what we want on HN, but I don't think it is fair to criticize the comments as being reflexive contrarians when they are simply and correctly pointing out that the claims being made in the article are misleading at best. And these aren't nit-picky details about side-issues in the article - the are the core headline claims that aren't further clarified or nuanced in the article text, so guidelines to not "pick the most provocative thing ... to complain about" aren't applicable IMO - without posts correcting the article many reader would have a wildly false understanding of what actually occurred which isn't what we want either. I think the best way to increase the quality of discussion for research results is to avoid posting misleading and hype driven coverage, so the discussion can then focus on the actual research results and their implications, rather than on the poor coverage.
• mbgerring 4y ago
  People are cynical because the world is already feeling the effects of climate change, the technology exists today to move the grid to zero emissions, and because the work required to do that is a quotidian, slow-and-steady slog, it gets ignored in terms of both funding and mindshare in favor of things like nuclear fusion experiments.
  • themitigating 4y ago
    Are you claiming a key reason that low or zero emissions technology hasn't been implemented is due to scientists wasting time on nuclear fusion experiments? Not entire political spectrum who doesn't believe global warming to be real, overstated, or some sort of conspiracy.
• NotYourLawyer 4y ago
  It’s ok to be cynical about things that are massively overhyped. This development is an important milestone, but it is nowhere near what it is being reported as.
• scottLobster 4y ago
  My experience is that if scientists are exited about it then it's probably not a big deal to non-scientists. It may be a small piece of a big deal in a few decades. Don't get me wrong I respect all the effort it takes to do something truly new, inventing technologies that previously didn't exist with the height of what we can produce today, and every step forward is a triumph. But is tomorrow's announcement going to lead to a step-change in anyone's life before my infant daughter goes to college? I doubt it, and I have work to do. I'm happy to be proven wrong though!
• brudgers 4y ago
  I am skeptical, not cynical. When I read what USDOE announces, I hope to be less skeptical. The basis of my skepticism rests on having written a term paper titled ’Nuclear Fusion, Infinite Energy for the Future’ in 1982, and after the semester sharing my ‘it’s only 20 years away’ enthusiasm with my father -a PhD scientist working for the DoD. Hence it’s forty years since I first heard ‘fusion is always 20 years away.’ Of course I don’t know any LLNL scientists but don’t question their or your sincerity or motivation. The difference between those and the incentives of financially oriented news reporting, doesn’t make me less skeptical. Their mandate is to present potentially market moving ideas before the market can move. And because I lived through Pons-Fleischman. Which is to say I have forty years of experience with reports…I mean I see excitement for Tokamaks and I wrote about them in 1982.
• 0xbadcafebee 4y ago
  "Announcing a breakthrough" without replicated results is exactly what made cold fusion a taboo subject in the first place. We are not 'reflexive contrarians' for going "I don't believe it until a lot of separate research groups show the same results". The whole point of the scientific method is to not believe somebody just because you personally know them or they are "respected". Their work has to be replicated for Science to take it seriously.
• jmyeet 4y ago
  It isn't cynicism. It's a reality check: 1. Energy output != power generation. At the end of every fusion reactor is boiling water to turn a turbine to generate electricity. There's a limit on efficiency and we still aren't there yet; 2. Much like all of nuclear power (fission included) we brush over capital costs and focus on operating costs because that tells a much better story. 3. We still have energy loss from neutron loss; 4. We still have container damage to content with due to neutron embrittlement. Even the article claims (and this is optimistic) that commercial fusion power generation is "decades away". Much like FTL travel, we get suckered into unwarranted optimism because we want it to be tru, particularly with the fuel abundance and (no) waste issues. We also fall into th enaive trap of thinking if stars can do it, it must work. But what contains stellar nuclear fusion is gravity. I'd argue there's still way too much optimism. Pointing out these issues doesn't make you a contrarian. It makes you a realist.
• chemmail 4y ago
  It doesn't matter if we find an infinite energy source. It will just shuffle the powers around. Nothing will really change. Humans will shift their fight to something else and inequality will still be the source of most of our problems.
• kranke155 4y ago
  It’s been clear like that for a while. Crypto threads are infested with nonsense, ignoring anything that’s even distantly related and ignoring any breakthroughs. Any new tech is poo pooed immediately.
• jxramos 4y ago
  that's a brilliant phrase, a reflexive contrarian. They just go the opposite of, I've been thinking about this behavior of late, great way to characterize it.
• rafaelero 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians and it’s a not healthy. I can't imagine what it is like to be in their heads. Even for things I am skeptical about, I still want them to be true if they are truly transformative. My worst case scenario is being cautious, but never, ever, negative.
• raydiatian 4y ago
  You’re just a reflexive (reflexive contrarian) contrarian
• chaosbolt 4y ago
  People have just become unsensitized to clickbait, it's mostly the media's fault, they always use titles like "cancer cure discovered" to get more views and thus more money, the viewers see a thousand articles like this and keep getting disappointed to the point a real cancer cure could be discovered and no one would believe it. tldr:crywolf
• alexndrTheGreat 4y ago
  [flagged]
• dr_orpheus 4y ago
  I think there are a couple different types of cynicism and one might be more justified than the other. The first one I see is along the lines of "This was only net energy gain in the plasma and not overall so it shouldn't be called a breakthrough". The net energy gain in the plasma is still a huge step and rightfully called a breakthrough. The second one is along the lines of "These are just intial results and the article says the data is still under review". This one I totally get. Replication of scientific results and accounting for all sources of errors is real big deal. The NIF had an experiment last year where they we able to achieve an ignition reaction but were unable to replicate it.
• TheCondor 4y ago
  I think the cynicism is linked to the cycles of bubbles. When it was all on the upside, inflating the bubble, there was a fair amount of hero worship here for Zuck and others. People were talking about self driving cars being leased by the minute and changing the world, all with a straight face. Google paid an engineer over $110million because he was going to lead the effort to build a fully autonomous self driving car... As an industry, we've sort of failed on that one. AI/ML was going to lead to mass layoffs of people as we "automated" everything, there were companies just pouring money in to anything related to it to avoid being left behind. I think I heard at a conference over the summer that 90+% of all ML/AI project fail to make it to production; that's brutal, like half I could see but 9 of 10?!? Even if you're getting paid tons of money to do that stuff, wouldn't you want to actually achieve some success? Social media has sort of failed us too, the real media got involved and sort of took it away and then the Russians and Chinese have been using it to tamper with our elections and our ability to practice democracy. The internet is "decentralized" but just try to do that without Google or Facebook or Amazon or other... Since everyone seems to be convinced a recession is going to happen, it's going to take one to sort of get things righted and start the next bubble cycle. Or maybe how the gig-economy was going to change it all. Or everyone was going to learn to cook gourmet meals from blue apron and all the carbon used to move boxes of ingredients around was never going to be a big deal... It's always based in hype. Every handful of years the geeks and nerds think they're going to take over the world again, maybe we'll do it next time. In the mean time, any and every break through with fusion is awesome. I'm a geek/nerd so don't believe my hype, but when we crack the fusion nut, we will change the world.
• arthurcolle 4y ago
  My father does radionucleidic metrology and every time there is a breakthrough at all, be it JET or something else, total rejection that it was a big deal or "real" or that its "not a large enough net gain reaction" to matter. Its wild I think scientists are humans after all and they (much like people who rejected bitcoin when it was at $3 and now have to justify their pre-held beliefs) have to justify why they didnt think it was possible or "real" even in the face of multiple fusion breakthroughs.
• jimbob45 4y ago
  This isn't practical and it isn't exciting. Shoving unexciting breakthroughs in everyone's face is part of the problem with science funding today. It's tough for actual breakthroughs to get traction in the news cycle because of all these underwhelming duds.
• marricks 4y ago
  People get cynical when they’ve been duped a hundred times on a hundred different things. I’d blame media more than users. But yeah, certainly seems like this time is different. Really hope we start seeing more breakthroughs after this as it’s great news.
• hilbert42 4y ago
  "LLNL - if they’re excited about this then it’s a big deal" Just because they're excited doesn't mean it's a big deal, nor any guarantee that it works or ends up being practical. I've heard 'exciting' news about fusion many, many times over my entire life and essentially all of them have come to nought. Or after the excitement settles down over said development we still find that fusion ends up being that magic number of 40 years into the future. I've even worked in the nuclear game but I don't expect to see my home powered by fusion energy in my lifetime, unfortunately.
• jiggawatts 4y ago
  We’re cynical because 100% of the announcements from the LLNL are essentially government propaganda. People laugh at Russian TV, but to a lesser extent all western governments do the same kind of thing. The LLNL has one job: research nuclear physics for maintaining the bomb stockpile without actually blowing any up in life fire tests. Anything else they say is just there to make the public feel good about the billions being spent on weapons research. There is zero — repeat — ZERO chance that the fusion approach used by LLNL will ever be used in any sort of energy production. That’s not what their setup is for.
• taneq 4y ago
  > This website is seriously infested with reflexive contrarians no it's not ( /s but also many of us have seen enough 'fusion breakthrough' and 'battery tech breakthrough' and 'medical breakthrough' and 'AI breakthrough' announcements that it's difficult to give anything much credence without at least a production prototype showing real world performance.)