4 ms·
If it’s fraud, what’s the end game?
by canjobear 3y ago
If it’s fraud, what’s the end game?
- bibabaloo 3y agoThere's betting markets on this, aren't there? The super cynical take is that the original scientists know that it's a fraud but in the lead up to it being proven as fraud can make a lot of money before coming out and saying "sorry, we messed up, experimental errors etc etc"
- AYBABTME 3y agoHow are they going to make money with this? A few weeks of buzz isn't going to make anyone rich. It's not like they're going for some product placement along with the buzz.
- mrtranscendence 3y agoI guess they could bet heavily against themselves, try to get prediction markets to coalesce around the result being genuine, them come out saying "oops, we were mistaken"? Bam, rich!
- scarmig 3y agoThere's also the possibility that the original team is deceiving themselves. By all appearances, they're deeply committed to this result (that could be an act, but that's not the sense I'm getting). But those biases could creep into the analysis of the material: in this particular field, a lot of things are witchcraft (witchcraft that occasionally works). So take a novel material with some interesting properties and human interpretative fallibility, and you get the paper. Which would still mean a powerful diamagnetic material, but that's... well, not something we'd have kilothreads on HN about. My stance (did research in high-Tc superconductors in undergrad ages ago, but doing banal software dev nowadays): who knows. The "easy replication" idea has faded away, which isn't promising, but maybe? It's fun to put my faith in Twitter anime catgirl avatars, though, so I'm still rooting for it.
- _0ffh 3y agoYeah, self-deception is a distinct possibility, and it would certainly not be the first time for something like that to happen.
- mrguyorama 3y agoIf it's fraud, this would be the second time a South Korean scientist has tried to lie about work that revolutionizes a field