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There’s plenty of skepticism. It’s the zero-cost position here. But there are good and bad skeptical positions. The good one involves people attempting to repli

There’s plenty of skepticism. It’s the zero-cost position here. But there are good and bad skeptical positions. The good one involves people attempting to replicate and publishing results whether positive, negative or somewhere in between. The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”. If there’s a real problem, it’s that we have still not made publication of negative results sufficiently attractive. That’s still a problem throughout science and one we desperately need to address since it is what would let us think more clearly in situations like this.

jacquesm 3y ago
> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”. You put it perfectly. I'm mostly skeptical and very guardedly optimistic because something seems to be happening. But I've very carefully marked each and every one of my comments with 'assuming this is true' or 'if this is true' to avoid the impression that I'm already convinced. I'm not. But I'm on the side of everybody getting their hands and their lab gear dirty: they are the ones doing the work and they are the ones who put their time (and sometimes their reputations) on the line. That starts off with the original Korean team but also goes for everybody else that has rolled up their sleeves and gone to work. Those people have an audience now, thanks to all these connected media and it's great to see the scientific process acting out in the open for a change where everybody gets to see how the sausage is made. Meanwhile the Debbie Downers have probably never seen the insides of a lab and have never made anything, they're just taking the default position because it doesn't require any work at all and has the highest likelihood of being true. But I very quietly hope that they're wrong and I also hope that if they are wrong that they will own it. Unqualified negativity is just as dumb as unqualified positivity, it just looks smarter, but it isn't a sign of intelligence.
- SantalBlush 3y ago
  I think the unqualified negativitiy is based on a common misunderstanding of the scientific process, that if one finds any shortcoming in a result--be it applied or theoretical--one can throw the entire work in the trash under the pretense of falsification. But this is wrong. Science is about weighing the totality of evidence, and refining that evidence in one direction or another over many iterations.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    Indeed, lots of progress was salvaged from failed attempts. In a way all of science is a continuous refinement of our model of how things really work by finding how it definitely doesn't work.
api 3y ago
> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”. I refer to these folks as the "boring universe brigade." The heuristic seems to be that if it's in any way exciting it's probably bullshit. It's a blind overreaction to memetically-optimized pseudoscience.
- poopbutt7 3y ago
  How can we forget that- 34 years ago- Pons and Fleischmann made a claim that was incorrect! /s
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Well, that position is right 99.9% of the time.
  - scarmig 3y ago
    pg: "Being too cynical will cause you to miss out on the most important phase changes." Defaulting to "no" might get you the right answer the majority of the time, but it also makes you miss the times that "yes" is correct. And correct things that are a radical departure from the status quo are probably the most important and useful to get right. Skepticism is good (it's still ambiguous whether LK-99 is anything at all), but pessimistic cynicism is not the same thing.
    - abracadaniel 3y ago
      The brain loves an excuse to apply a noise cutting heuristic. There was an article a while back about that being a problem for general physicians, where the problem is usually simple, but very very rarely something serious. A doctor can appear good when they get it right 99% of the time, but they might achieve that by defaulting to “you’re fine, here’s some (ibuprofen/antibiotic/antihistamine/etc)”. Thus, their actual job is to identify that 1% with reasonable accuracy.
  - api 3y ago
    By that logic a rock is right 99.9% of the time. I just asked one whether LK-99 will replicate and it said nothing. Reasonable skepticism is always warranted. I think this thread is talking about reflexive cynicism and instantaneous dismissal.

jacquesm 3y ago

> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”. You put it perfectly. I'm mostly skeptical and very guardedly optimistic because something seems to be happening. But I've very carefully marked each and every one of my comments with 'assuming this is true' or 'if this is true' to avoid the impression that I'm already convinced. I'm not. But I'm on the side of everybody getting their hands and their lab gear dirty: they are the ones doing the work and they are the ones who put their time (and sometimes their reputations) on the line. That starts off with the original Korean team but also goes for everybody else that has rolled up their sleeves and gone to work. Those people have an audience now, thanks to all these connected media and it's great to see the scientific process acting out in the open for a change where everybody gets to see how the sausage is made. Meanwhile the Debbie Downers have probably never seen the insides of a lab and have never made anything, they're just taking the default position because it doesn't require any work at all and has the highest likelihood of being true. But I very quietly hope that they're wrong and I also hope that if they are wrong that they will own it. Unqualified negativity is just as dumb as unqualified positivity, it just looks smarter, but it isn't a sign of intelligence.

SantalBlush 3y ago
I think the unqualified negativitiy is based on a common misunderstanding of the scientific process, that if one finds any shortcoming in a result--be it applied or theoretical--one can throw the entire work in the trash under the pretense of falsification. But this is wrong. Science is about weighing the totality of evidence, and refining that evidence in one direction or another over many iterations.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  Indeed, lots of progress was salvaged from failed attempts. In a way all of science is a continuous refinement of our model of how things really work by finding how it definitely doesn't work.

api 3y ago

> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”. I refer to these folks as the "boring universe brigade." The heuristic seems to be that if it's in any way exciting it's probably bullshit. It's a blind overreaction to memetically-optimized pseudoscience.

poopbutt7 3y ago
How can we forget that- 34 years ago- Pons and Fleischmann made a claim that was incorrect! /s
zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Well, that position is right 99.9% of the time.
- scarmig 3y ago
  pg: "Being too cynical will cause you to miss out on the most important phase changes." Defaulting to "no" might get you the right answer the majority of the time, but it also makes you miss the times that "yes" is correct. And correct things that are a radical departure from the status quo are probably the most important and useful to get right. Skepticism is good (it's still ambiguous whether LK-99 is anything at all), but pessimistic cynicism is not the same thing.
  - abracadaniel 3y ago
    The brain loves an excuse to apply a noise cutting heuristic. There was an article a while back about that being a problem for general physicians, where the problem is usually simple, but very very rarely something serious. A doctor can appear good when they get it right 99% of the time, but they might achieve that by defaulting to “you’re fine, here’s some (ibuprofen/antibiotic/antihistamine/etc)”. Thus, their actual job is to identify that 1% with reasonable accuracy.
- api 3y ago
  By that logic a rock is right 99.9% of the time. I just asked one whether LK-99 will replicate and it said nothing. Reasonable skepticism is always warranted. I think this thread is talking about reflexive cynicism and instantaneous dismissal.