4 ms·

The thing is - there is a totally easy and simple mechanism to create early-stage believability. Take a video of you producing and testing it, with a mobile ph

The thing is - there is a totally easy and simple mechanism to create early-stage believability. Take a video of you producing and testing it, with a mobile phone. It only works 10% of the time? Not an issue, post 10 videos. Whatever. Would it be perfect? No, of course it could be faked. But i guaranteed people would be a ton less skeptical and willing to push hard on this if the original authors had done this sort of thing. It's honestly not that hard to set up a tripod and a mobile phone, and even in the circumstances here, where they apparently got pushed to publish quickly, it could still show that it works. It also would help those trying to reproduce see exactly what you did, in detail.

bluGill 3y ago
Production takes more than a day - I don't know of any phone that can take videos lasting that long (if people are even willing to watch it). You can of course take several videos and splice them together. Worse yet, I can with a bit of trick photography and standard liquid nitrogen cooled super conductors make a video that looks like success even though I'm working with colored wax for materials in the production process. (liquid nitrogen is hard to disguise, but with some trick photography and multiple takes I can do it). Or I can skip all that and spend some time in blender to do the above via CGI. (well I don't know blender that well, and most blender animations are obvious, but someone with a few months could pull this off)
- DannyBee 3y ago
  Ignore mobile phones, put in a nest, whatever. It is not that hard or expensive to record footage for a few days at a time having a continuous overwrite. You likely don't even need to go that far -Most universities have cameras everywhere, anyway, including plenty of universities that have cameras in every lab of this kind. It is also done by millions of home users all the time. As I said, yes, things can be faked, but who cares that’s not the point
mhb 3y ago
Are you suggesting that they take phone video of all their experiments over the course of multiple years? Or just the one they know will succeed?
- lambdasquirrel 3y ago
  A lot of science takes a mind-numbing amount of time at the lab desk. Something like 40 hours a week just dedicated to picking apart fruit flies with tweezers under a microscope is pretty common. I think I read somewhere that with MatSci, mortars and pestles and blisters are involved. It would be a lot of recording that would have to happen, and then you have to record every setting on every instrument you touch. How do we know that that's actually that reagent in that bottle? Yeah this just doesn't hold up for actual science. It's not something you can just take a Zoom recording of.
  - fullspectrumdev 3y ago
    > mortars and pestles and blisters are involved Can confirm from my life prior to working with computers. “Is this mortar and pestle actually clean?” “How much grinding is the right amount?” “Is the window open or closed?” “Did someone fuck with the settings on this machine since I last used it?” And so on…
- DannyBee 3y ago
  I'm sorry, you really think it's that hard to have a camera running in a lab that records footage continuously, and you save the clips where you succeed? What percent of the cost of running these experiments do you think that is to buy a nest or a unifi camera? Heck, Do you believe the university doesn’t already have a surveillance system almost certainly in the hallway to the lab. Plenty of them even have cameras in every lab already. In the past two weeks, I was in three material science labs in Georgia, and South Carolina and all of them had cameras in every lab. This is not that hard. If you wanna argue that it’s not helpful, that’s one thing. But arguing that it is difficult seems very silly.
  - mhb 3y ago
bckr 3y ago
People are plenty motivated, it only came out a few days ago and there’s a replication attempt. As others have pointed out the idea of using video as strong evidence is underbaked.
- DannyBee 3y ago
  Which is why the top thread is now replication videos? I didn’t say strong evidence, I said evidence.I was, in fact, quite clear that it is not strong evidence. you seem to have added that so that you could be more dismissive.

bluGill 3y ago

Production takes more than a day - I don't know of any phone that can take videos lasting that long (if people are even willing to watch it). You can of course take several videos and splice them together. Worse yet, I can with a bit of trick photography and standard liquid nitrogen cooled super conductors make a video that looks like success even though I'm working with colored wax for materials in the production process. (liquid nitrogen is hard to disguise, but with some trick photography and multiple takes I can do it). Or I can skip all that and spend some time in blender to do the above via CGI. (well I don't know blender that well, and most blender animations are obvious, but someone with a few months could pull this off)

DannyBee 3y ago
Ignore mobile phones, put in a nest, whatever. It is not that hard or expensive to record footage for a few days at a time having a continuous overwrite. You likely don't even need to go that far -Most universities have cameras everywhere, anyway, including plenty of universities that have cameras in every lab of this kind. It is also done by millions of home users all the time. As I said, yes, things can be faked, but who cares that’s not the point

mhb 3y ago

Are you suggesting that they take phone video of all their experiments over the course of multiple years? Or just the one they know will succeed?

lambdasquirrel 3y ago
A lot of science takes a mind-numbing amount of time at the lab desk. Something like 40 hours a week just dedicated to picking apart fruit flies with tweezers under a microscope is pretty common. I think I read somewhere that with MatSci, mortars and pestles and blisters are involved. It would be a lot of recording that would have to happen, and then you have to record every setting on every instrument you touch. How do we know that that's actually that reagent in that bottle? Yeah this just doesn't hold up for actual science. It's not something you can just take a Zoom recording of.
- fullspectrumdev 3y ago
  > mortars and pestles and blisters are involved Can confirm from my life prior to working with computers. “Is this mortar and pestle actually clean?” “How much grinding is the right amount?” “Is the window open or closed?” “Did someone fuck with the settings on this machine since I last used it?” And so on…
DannyBee 3y ago
I'm sorry, you really think it's that hard to have a camera running in a lab that records footage continuously, and you save the clips where you succeed? What percent of the cost of running these experiments do you think that is to buy a nest or a unifi camera? Heck, Do you believe the university doesn’t already have a surveillance system almost certainly in the hallway to the lab. Plenty of them even have cameras in every lab already. In the past two weeks, I was in three material science labs in Georgia, and South Carolina and all of them had cameras in every lab. This is not that hard. If you wanna argue that it’s not helpful, that’s one thing. But arguing that it is difficult seems very silly.
- mhb 3y ago

bckr 3y ago

People are plenty motivated, it only came out a few days ago and there’s a replication attempt. As others have pointed out the idea of using video as strong evidence is underbaked.

DannyBee 3y ago
Which is why the top thread is now replication videos? I didn’t say strong evidence, I said evidence.I was, in fact, quite clear that it is not strong evidence. you seem to have added that so that you could be more dismissive.