12 ms·
There are 2 things in favor of the Korean team - Hyun-Tak Kim is unlikely to ruin his career and legacy for something careless and frivolous. But stranger thin
by ironborn123 3y ago
There are 2 things in favor of the Korean team
- Hyun-Tak Kim is unlikely to ruin his career and legacy for something careless and frivolous. But stranger things have happened, so lets assign a 10% probability to give some benefit of doubt to the team.
- The various DFT papers show interesting flat band structures. But DFT is an approximation and also they do not take into account electron electron correlations. So lets assign another 10% probability for this support.
This crude estimate would give a 20% chance of RTSC. Rest has to be resolved by actual demonstrations, primarily from the Korean team themselves, and then from reputed Western researchers/labs.
- carabiner 3y agoI too like to assign probabilities to my vibes. Much more legitimate.
- j7ake 3y agoIt’s the Bayesian way.
- ant6n 3y agoCommon in tech: “95% of our users wont care if we make the product worse by…”
- socrates1024 3y agoThat's falsifiable though, in a way the other examples are not. You could sample the population of users after the change to the product
- gilleain 3y agoReminds me of how Data in Star Trek would say things like "There is a 79.85 probability of success". I mean, maybe it is possible to assign probabilities to future events that you have never seen before, but somehow I doubt it (with 12.88% likelihood).
- itsoktocry 3y ago>but somehow I doubt it You doubt it? That means you're assigning some underlying probability to the event (not) occurring. Why does it seem strange to you if people are explicit about their priors?
- throwanem 3y agoIt's not that it's strange, it's that it is transparently silly to claim to precisely quantify in the absence of anything resembling sufficient information for the problem to be treated probabilistically.
- meroes 3y agoYa what if you just don’t know
- throwanem 3y agoAny jackass off the street can just not know things! If you want to get invited to the in-crowd's house parties, you're going to need to do a lot better than that.
- falcor84 3y agoHow about this? I keep a running probability (e.g. a 32bit float) for the successful outcome of each future event I have absolutely no idea about. At first I make it 50%, but I gradually adjust with each result, such that I aim to minimize my bias. It might sound silly, but at the minimum it would encode some information about the kind of events I'm typically asked to predict. And I do expect it could end up something like 0.5642635 for a particular time in my life.
- throwanem 3y ago"Not even wrong." An event about whose outcome you by definition have no information ("I have absolutely no idea") is an event to which you cannot assign any probability, including by assuming it's a coin flip and then treating the assumption as axiomatic. It encodes no information whatsoever because there is none to encode, and it biases all future results because you're averaging over a range that includes "data" you made up.
- whimsicalism 3y agoI think this culturally comes from lesswrong and it really makes me laugh every time I see it
- bnralt 3y agoYeah, Scott Alexander wrote a whole article about how people should use made up fake statistics instead of simply saying "I don't know"[1]. [1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its-worth-doing-with-made-up-statistics/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/05/02/if-its-worth-doing-its...
- suslik 3y agoNot always. "I don't know" is identical to saying "I have a uniform prior". In the particular case of LK-99, my prior is perfectly uniform - I know absolutely nothing about the subject matter and almost everything I read on the topic feels way above my head. As I refuse to be influenced by experts (or "experts") until there is some sort of consensus, I have absolutely no good reason to say anything but "I don't know".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- 8note 3y agoA perfectly uniform prior suggests that you think that it's easy to make a room temperature super conductor and that people have made them before with equal likelihood to it being hard to make a room temperature superconductor and people haven't made them before, doesnt it? I don't know much about superconductors, but I do know that people have been trying to make them work at room temperature, and generally failing
- tw1984 3y ago> Hyun-Tak Kim is unlikely to ruin his career and legacy for something careless and frivolous. you came with presumption that this man knows & understands the subject matter. that is a very bold assumption given the mounting evidence against such brief. > so lets assign a 10% probability why 10%? not 0.01%? because of his "prof." title or previous publications? Surely that won't change the course of nature I thought? > and then from reputed Western researchers/labs. what makes you discount inputs from Russian, Chinese, Japanese researchers? You seem to have some really wired brief here, get some help I say.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xyproto 3y ago> You seem to have some really wired brief here, get some help I say. I googled "wired brief" and this is what I found: https://www.ebay.ca/itm/303994118271 https://www.ebay.ca/itm/303994118271
- lobochrome 3y agoI swam those a lot.
- tw1984 3y agoSorry for the typo, statistically you make more typos when you write in a foreign language. feel free to make fun of it, totally fine with me.
- xyproto 3y agoIt's not my native language either. Sorry if you felt made fun of.
- smcl 3y agoI've seen this on here before. Guys convincing themselves that they're being rational and you're being emotional - because they put little numbers besides their feelings and perform some calculations to produce a percentage that "proves" their theory about Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible.
- DiscoBahb 3y agoRepeat after me: Flat bands do not imply superconductivity. DFT calculations cannot be used to predict superconductivity. DFT is a single-particle calculation. Superconductivity is a multi-particle phenomenon. At most, the preprint(s) you're referring to suggest that maybe (under their unverified assumptions) electron-electron interactions could lead to interesting physics in that material. It provides no evidence for what that physics looks like and says nothing about what temperature these things will occur. High temperature superconductivity is not well understood and we do not have the theoretical tools to make quantitative predictions about it. At best we run dodgy simulations, squint at the resulting plots, and say "hm, that's interesting".
- canadianfella 3y ago[dead]
- layer8 3y agoThat's not how probabilities combine.
- ironborn123 3y agoYou are right, but probability estimation of possibly novel phenomena is an ill posed problem. So either you do not model it at all, or come up with some mental model of what probability you are comfortable with and due to which factors; the factors being more important than the final number.
- layer8 3y agoThe exact numbers don’t matter, but your post indicates that you seem to have the wrong mental model of how to adjust your credences. The probability of each factor decreases the overall probability, not increases.
- ironborn123 3y agoAlright lets do some calculations. Feel free to dissect the assumptions. K event = Kim says Material L is RTSC D event = DFT says L is RTSC S event = L is actually RTSC we have assumed P(S/K) and P(S/D) are each 0.1, though we could have chosen other numbers for them as well. We want to estimate P = P(S/(K and D)) P = P((K and D)/S)P(S)/P(K and D) Assuming Kim and DFT are in the business of making positive predictions, they always get it right when L is actually RTSC. so P(K/S),P(D/S) and P((K and D)/S) are all taken as 1 hence P = P(S)/P(K and D) = P(S)/(P(K)P(D/K)) = P(S/K)/P(D/K) = 0.1/P(D/K) (similarly, P = P(S/D)/P(K/D) = 0.1/P(K/D)) But ofcourse we dont know P(D/K) or P(K/D). We could check historical data on how often D aligns with K, a messy exercise at best. Say they dont perfectly align, then the conditionals are less than 1,and P>0.1. Even intuitively when K (or D) gets additional support in the form of D (or K), your P should increase, not decrease. If we assume D and K align on average, then P(D/K) or P(K/D) is 0.5, and we get P = 0.2. You may estimate everything above differently, thus getting a different P. You can also come up with your own way of modelling this. I came up with my particular estimate to understand how frequently should i follow the news, and care about the whole thing. You should model it according to your usecase.
- lamontcg 3y ago> Hyun-Tak Kim is unlikely to ruin his career and legacy for something careless and frivolous. Everyone is suddenly an expert in HT Kim's character who didn't have any idea who he was a month ago. And this definitely is a sort of "black swan" event in the same sense that major airline crashes are absolutely atypical of normal air travel. Inherently this viral media event is going to involve atypical constituent parts. The idea that we could have found some of the most overconfident and underqualified material science researchers out there, who could not realize they were committing career suicide, making these claims isn't very paradoxical at all. Most aircraft maintenance is exceptionally high quality. You're going to find a lot of bad maintenance in the fatal air disasters that hit the headlines. The FAA doesn't approach an air disaster by assuming the good intent of everyone involved with the maintenance of the plane, and that their inherently understanding that lives are in their hands if they make mistakes should necessarily diminish the likelihood of maintenance issues. They assign "0%" significance to that kind of things and instead just investigate what caused the crash. If it was bad maintenance then the operator and/or the mechanic doing the maintenance take the hit to their reputations. Same thing here.