3 ms·

I went through and reread the whole news article. There's nothing wrong with this article. I really don't see what you have to complain about. It's broadly f

by dekhn 3y ago

I went through and reread the whole news article. There's nothing wrong with this article. I really don't see what you have to complain about. It's broadly factual, and roughly consistent with the mainstream opinion at this point: there is no smoking gun evidence of anything, and the noise being generated by social amateurs is making it hard to find the real signal from the small number of groups competent enough to make useful statements about this "discovery".

jacquesm 3y ago
Yes, and it serves no purpose other than to get Nature in the position where they can hedge their bets based on rejecting the article earlier and publishing this now just in case it eventually does work out. It's content free from Nature's audience perspective, nobody reading it will think 'hey wow, this is news to me', if they've been at all interested. So it must serve some other purpose because Nature doesn't just publish anything. I was wondering earlier why they would publish it and I think it isn't too farfetched to see this as a deliberate strategy to protect their interests. It's going to be interesting what happens on both sides of the fork: what they will do if after say 3 months there still isn't any very clear replication and when there is. For both of those they have positioned themselves well. What irks me about it is that it's been all of a week and yet Nature is already deprecating it because the replication efforts fall short. It would seem to me to be a little bit early for that, what did they expect? And sure, we can argue over whether it was nature or the writer that is the root cause here but someone with editorial control at Nature must have felt it was good enough to include, even though it is just premature meta commentary, not science news.
- dekhn 3y ago
  Nature doesn't need to hedge its position. The article doesn't deprecate LK-99. The article is about the hype surrounding the announcement and its replication results, mainly, but not exclusively by, amateurs in other fields (who seem to have shown that they can make samples that have unconventional properties, but not necessarily superconducting). It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis. "After the initial report of apparent superluminal velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Experimental experts were aware of the complexity and difficulty of the measurement, so an extra unrecognized measurement error was still a real possibility, despite the care taken by the OPERA team"
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    No, but they also don't need to try to catch some of the hype while pretending to be immune to that hype. Clearly they feel the need to put LK-99 in at least one article title even if there is no news. That's not their normal standard for articles, at least not as far as I'm aware. I'm aware of quite a few other scientific debacles, some involving outright fraud, data fabrication and sometimes true believers that even convinced themselves. What is interesting about the Ranga Diaz episode is that it was Nature that published it (and it took two years to retract it): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving.
    - arka2147483647 3y ago
      > So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving. If there is this hot topic about LK-99, is it not their job to report it to their readers? Not everybody follows social media or has come across this personally. From this point of view, the article seems fair enough roundup of whats been happening.
  - Natsu 3y ago
    > It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis. "Debacle?" Some scientists saw something funny, pointed out that it violated known laws of physics, and asked for help explaining the results. They got that help relatively quickly and it was found that, indeed, the neutrinos were not moving faster than light. If I were looking for a debacle, I'd look for something where there was outright fraud. Here we have lots of people levitating small black rocks. It's probable that the samples created are impure, but something interesting might well be going on and so it's getting attention. Making things levitate like that is pretty cool, though, even if yes, you can do it with pencil lead (and a different magnet setup, not just a single magnet). So people are trying to understand it. It's messy, and the results are unclear, but... hey, that's how things go. Sure, I'll wait to call it confirmed until we have a number of labs with good quality samples and expert testing, but I'll also give them time to actually try a few things since there are good reasons to think the synthesis is less easy than is reported. But I'm not going to hate on people who just wanna see the rocks float, either. And we have quite a few people now with floaty rocks, which is more than enough to keep the average person entertained while the science settles.
- mattkrause 3y ago
  Nature doesn’t need to hedge because their reputation won’t really affected by publishing—-or not publishing—-something on LK-99. Paul Laterbur, who won a Nobel Prize for MRI after Nature rejected his paper on it has quipped that "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature." The “top journals miss good stuff all the time; they publish bad stuff pretty often too. Sorting them out is just really hard.

by dekhn 3y ago

jacquesm 3y ago

Yes, and it serves no purpose other than to get Nature in the position where they can hedge their bets based on rejecting the article earlier and publishing this now just in case it eventually does work out. It's content free from Nature's audience perspective, nobody reading it will think 'hey wow, this is news to me', if they've been at all interested. So it must serve some other purpose because Nature doesn't just publish anything. I was wondering earlier why they would publish it and I think it isn't too farfetched to see this as a deliberate strategy to protect their interests. It's going to be interesting what happens on both sides of the fork: what they will do if after say 3 months there still isn't any very clear replication and when there is. For both of those they have positioned themselves well. What irks me about it is that it's been all of a week and yet Nature is already deprecating it because the replication efforts fall short. It would seem to me to be a little bit early for that, what did they expect? And sure, we can argue over whether it was nature or the writer that is the root cause here but someone with editorial control at Nature must have felt it was good enough to include, even though it is just premature meta commentary, not science news.

dekhn 3y ago
Nature doesn't need to hedge its position. The article doesn't deprecate LK-99. The article is about the hype surrounding the announcement and its replication results, mainly, but not exclusively by, amateurs in other fields (who seem to have shown that they can make samples that have unconventional properties, but not necessarily superconducting). It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis. "After the initial report of apparent superluminal velocities of neutrinos, most physicists in the field were quietly skeptical of the results, but prepared to adopt a wait-and-see approach. Experimental experts were aware of the complexity and difficulty of the measurement, so an extra unrecognized measurement error was still a real possibility, despite the care taken by the OPERA team"
- jacquesm 3y ago
  No, but they also don't need to try to catch some of the hype while pretending to be immune to that hype. Clearly they feel the need to put LK-99 in at least one article title even if there is no news. That's not their normal standard for articles, at least not as far as I'm aware. I'm aware of quite a few other scientific debacles, some involving outright fraud, data fabrication and sometimes true believers that even convinced themselves. What is interesting about the Ranga Diaz episode is that it was Nature that published it (and it took two years to retract it): https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2801-z So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving.
  - arka2147483647 3y ago
    > So their stance right now is understandable but also a bit self serving. If there is this hot topic about LK-99, is it not their job to report it to their readers? Not everybody follows social media or has come across this personally. From this point of view, the article seems fair enough roundup of whats been happening.
- Natsu 3y ago
  > It's worth reading about a previous social media science debacle, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-than-light_neutrino_ano... where the observations of neutrinos being faster than light was eventually debugged to some simple hardware errors and naive analysis. "Debacle?" Some scientists saw something funny, pointed out that it violated known laws of physics, and asked for help explaining the results. They got that help relatively quickly and it was found that, indeed, the neutrinos were not moving faster than light. If I were looking for a debacle, I'd look for something where there was outright fraud. Here we have lots of people levitating small black rocks. It's probable that the samples created are impure, but something interesting might well be going on and so it's getting attention. Making things levitate like that is pretty cool, though, even if yes, you can do it with pencil lead (and a different magnet setup, not just a single magnet). So people are trying to understand it. It's messy, and the results are unclear, but... hey, that's how things go. Sure, I'll wait to call it confirmed until we have a number of labs with good quality samples and expert testing, but I'll also give them time to actually try a few things since there are good reasons to think the synthesis is less easy than is reported. But I'm not going to hate on people who just wanna see the rocks float, either. And we have quite a few people now with floaty rocks, which is more than enough to keep the average person entertained while the science settles.
mattkrause 3y ago
Nature doesn’t need to hedge because their reputation won’t really affected by publishing—-or not publishing—-something on LK-99. Paul Laterbur, who won a Nobel Prize for MRI after Nature rejected his paper on it has quipped that "You could write the entire history of science in the last 50 years in terms of papers rejected by Science or Nature." The “top journals miss good stuff all the time; they publish bad stuff pretty often too. Sorting them out is just really hard.