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In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situa

In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire.

whimsicalism 3y ago
I haven’t seen this get much play outside of HN and… those are not the problems facing most HN commentators
- carabiner 3y ago
  I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?
llm_nerd 3y ago
What would the internet have gotten "wrong"? It's a paper and now people will try to replicate it. Some informed people give their take on why it sounds right and/or wrong, but ultimately they aren't (and can't) verify or debunk it yet pending further investigations. I have zero expertise to give an opinion either way, and honestly the impact of room temperature/pressure superconductors just doesn't seem that overwhelming. Maybe more maglev trains? As with many things now, there are that small set of people who need to pick a "position" early and then stake a part of their ego on it. Which is super weird and destructive, and underlies many of the bad tendencies of the web.
- carabiner 3y ago
  This story deserves no more attention than the 10,000 crank papers submitted to Arxiv every day about time travel, prime numbers, antigravity. There is nothing worth replicating. That's what they got wrong.
  - HDThoreaun 3y ago
    Except one of the authors on the good paper is a professor at a legit research university with thousands of citations.
    - carabiner 3y ago
      Just like Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist claiming he's about to find ET. Or the MIT profs a few years ago who thought they could be billionaires with a naive bayes algo for trading bitcoin. Guess what they're doing now? Hint: still have dayjobs.
- galangalalgol 3y ago
  It depends on the quench current, but yeah, maglev, hoverboards, much cheaper MRI machines, less reliance on the diminishing helium reserves, lower cost experimental fusion reactors and particle accelerators too. That last could lead to progress speeding up in that research as more people can try stuff. Lower cost for power transmission would make renewables that are geographically limited more usable. Also coil and rail guns would probably proliferate... If the quench current is high enough you could see handguns that charge on usb-c and are not legally firearms in any nation I'm aware of. Quite a disruptor.
dang 3y ago
As far as HN's discussion goes, I'd say the community has been getting it right. The conversation has been curious and substantive, everyone knows it's probably not true, but most are not making shallow dismissals. There's a shared sense of waiting for the replications to succeed or fail, and in the meantime, discussion of the details as well as what the impact would be if it does turn out. Also driving interest is that the claims are said to be easy to replicate if true, so the answer is expected any time now. Imminence fuels anticipation—like waiting for election results. The shallow dismissal reaction is taking for granted that it's not real and everyone's wrong to give it a chance. The thing is, almost everything is wrong—you can rely on this almost completely, and placing your bet on "wrong wrong wrong" achieves a high batting average—you'll be right almost all the time. The trouble is that your expected value will be zero, and you will be both bored and boring (I don't mean you personally—this is a common pattern and we all do it to some extent). It's in the low-probability/high-impact quadrant that the interesting things reside, alongside crank material and dross, and it's not easy to tell them apart. That's natural. But one thing we can be sure of is that rejecting everything in that quadrant is a sure way to fail in the long run, and probably also to keep oneself in a bad mood.
- SamPatt 3y ago
  Dang, Dang. Well said. I enjoy HN most in times like this.
- TillE 3y ago
  This really nicely echoes a response to Eliezer Yudkowsky that I saw: if you always just play the odds on stuff like this, you're gonna be wrong about the real breakthroughs, which by definition defy the odds. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but I remain hopeful. All the theoretical critiques are extra interesting if this is real and the data is basically accurate.
- mustacheemperor 3y ago
  I thought wow, what a substantive, insightful comment on HN, I need to save this one. And then I saw you wrote it! Glad you're the one running our madhouse, thank you.

whimsicalism 3y ago

I haven’t seen this get much play outside of HN and… those are not the problems facing most HN commentators

carabiner 3y ago
I should say that even if it doesn't affect them personally, it creates their worldview when it is 90% of their news. Homeless crisis, war in Ukraine. Why wouldn't you want and allow some positive, apolitical, hopeful story about noble science to consume your attention instead?

llm_nerd 3y ago

What would the internet have gotten "wrong"? It's a paper and now people will try to replicate it. Some informed people give their take on why it sounds right and/or wrong, but ultimately they aren't (and can't) verify or debunk it yet pending further investigations. I have zero expertise to give an opinion either way, and honestly the impact of room temperature/pressure superconductors just doesn't seem that overwhelming. Maybe more maglev trains? As with many things now, there are that small set of people who need to pick a "position" early and then stake a part of their ego on it. Which is super weird and destructive, and underlies many of the bad tendencies of the web.

carabiner 3y ago
This story deserves no more attention than the 10,000 crank papers submitted to Arxiv every day about time travel, prime numbers, antigravity. There is nothing worth replicating. That's what they got wrong.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  Except one of the authors on the good paper is a professor at a legit research university with thousands of citations.
  - carabiner 3y ago
    Just like Avi Loeb, the Harvard astrophysicist claiming he's about to find ET. Or the MIT profs a few years ago who thought they could be billionaires with a naive bayes algo for trading bitcoin. Guess what they're doing now? Hint: still have dayjobs.
galangalalgol 3y ago
It depends on the quench current, but yeah, maglev, hoverboards, much cheaper MRI machines, less reliance on the diminishing helium reserves, lower cost experimental fusion reactors and particle accelerators too. That last could lead to progress speeding up in that research as more people can try stuff. Lower cost for power transmission would make renewables that are geographically limited more usable. Also coil and rail guns would probably proliferate... If the quench current is high enough you could see handguns that charge on usb-c and are not legally firearms in any nation I'm aware of. Quite a disruptor.

dang 3y ago

As far as HN's discussion goes, I'd say the community has been getting it right. The conversation has been curious and substantive, everyone knows it's probably not true, but most are not making shallow dismissals. There's a shared sense of waiting for the replications to succeed or fail, and in the meantime, discussion of the details as well as what the impact would be if it does turn out. Also driving interest is that the claims are said to be easy to replicate if true, so the answer is expected any time now. Imminence fuels anticipation—like waiting for election results. The shallow dismissal reaction is taking for granted that it's not real and everyone's wrong to give it a chance. The thing is, almost everything is wrong—you can rely on this almost completely, and placing your bet on "wrong wrong wrong" achieves a high batting average—you'll be right almost all the time. The trouble is that your expected value will be zero, and you will be both bored and boring (I don't mean you personally—this is a common pattern and we all do it to some extent). It's in the low-probability/high-impact quadrant that the interesting things reside, alongside crank material and dross, and it's not easy to tell them apart. That's natural. But one thing we can be sure of is that rejecting everything in that quadrant is a sure way to fail in the long run, and probably also to keep oneself in a bad mood.

SamPatt 3y ago
Dang, Dang. Well said. I enjoy HN most in times like this.
TillE 3y ago
This really nicely echoes a response to Eliezer Yudkowsky that I saw: if you always just play the odds on stuff like this, you're gonna be wrong about the real breakthroughs, which by definition defy the odds. There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but I remain hopeful. All the theoretical critiques are extra interesting if this is real and the data is basically accurate.
mustacheemperor 3y ago
I thought wow, what a substantive, insightful comment on HN, I need to save this one. And then I saw you wrote it! Glad you're the one running our madhouse, thank you.