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Same thing that happened with the expert analysis of LK99. It turns out that the real experts tend to be quieter.

refulgentis 3y ago
In our overly connected times, it can feel like there's always two tribes, ours, and the one with the immoral charlatans & savages. Buying into that leads to unpleasantly toned one-man morality plays, based on obviously false claims, like there were people claiming to be experts and then they claimed it was guaranteed it was a room temperature superconductor.
Eji1700 3y ago
I mean they weren't quiet, just drowned out. There's this mindset of trusting dreams/drama/personalities more than verifiable processes, and as communities like HN have shown, even people in fields associated with better logic clearly are willing to discard all the caution they'd normally use because they'd like it to be true and someone is saying it is. I feel like SBF actually represents this flaw wonderfully. A person who just does what he wants and has mostly been well enough off to dodge any sort of real consequences. He probably still thought he was doing nothing wrong and still does because the idea that he could be wrong is just not possible because he knows so much. Honestly my already low opinion of groups like WHO/SEC has dropped tremendously with recent events and how they were handled on drama/media reporting rather than actual evidence and science. This rush to the story is hellishly toxic to doing things right, and the vitriol people will spew if you conflict with them on it is gross.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  >even people in fields associated with better logic This is such an HN elitist opinion that needs to go away. Programmers aren't magically better at "logic" ie making good conclusions from messy data. We still have human brains, and are equally prone to the same exact logical fallacies and biases as everyone else. The human brain is an anti-rational system. Stop pretending we are special little geniuses just because we know advanced math or javascript. The only filter function for HN is a willingness to read text from people who think they are better than you
  - Eji1700 3y ago
    I said associated for a reason. Personally I think most "smart" fields have about the same ratio of morons as any other.
swores 3y ago
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about LK99 other than feeling smug for some weird reason? Maybe I was looking in the wrong place about people discussing LK99, but I've seen a lot of comments/tweets/articles/etc about it, and while there've been lots of optimistic discussions about how amazing a discovery it will be if proven true, and lots of people guessing whether it's more likely to be true, or fraud, or not-fraud but a mistake, I've seen practically nobody confidentially saying "this must be true". Have you? And even if you have, it hasn't yet been proven to not be true. So... what's the point of your snide comment?
- sillysaurusx 3y ago
  I think this logic works the other way around: very few people were saying SBF was absolutely not going to jail, just that it was unlikely. As for LK99, I suppose I’m bummed the hype didn’t pan out. It made me more skeptical of that kind of optimism, and it seemed somewhat related.

In our overly connected times, it can feel like there's always two tribes, ours, and the one with the immoral charlatans & savages. Buying into that leads to unpleasantly toned one-man morality plays, based on obviously false claims, like there were people claiming to be experts and then they claimed it was guaranteed it was a room temperature superconductor.

Eji1700 3y ago

I mean they weren't quiet, just drowned out. There's this mindset of trusting dreams/drama/personalities more than verifiable processes, and as communities like HN have shown, even people in fields associated with better logic clearly are willing to discard all the caution they'd normally use because they'd like it to be true and someone is saying it is. I feel like SBF actually represents this flaw wonderfully. A person who just does what he wants and has mostly been well enough off to dodge any sort of real consequences. He probably still thought he was doing nothing wrong and still does because the idea that he could be wrong is just not possible because he knows so much. Honestly my already low opinion of groups like WHO/SEC has dropped tremendously with recent events and how they were handled on drama/media reporting rather than actual evidence and science. This rush to the story is hellishly toxic to doing things right, and the vitriol people will spew if you conflict with them on it is gross.

mrguyorama 3y ago
>even people in fields associated with better logic This is such an HN elitist opinion that needs to go away. Programmers aren't magically better at "logic" ie making good conclusions from messy data. We still have human brains, and are equally prone to the same exact logical fallacies and biases as everyone else. The human brain is an anti-rational system. Stop pretending we are special little geniuses just because we know advanced math or javascript. The only filter function for HN is a willingness to read text from people who think they are better than you
- Eji1700 3y ago
  I said associated for a reason. Personally I think most "smart" fields have about the same ratio of morons as any other.

swores 3y ago

I'm not sure what point you're trying to make about LK99 other than feeling smug for some weird reason? Maybe I was looking in the wrong place about people discussing LK99, but I've seen a lot of comments/tweets/articles/etc about it, and while there've been lots of optimistic discussions about how amazing a discovery it will be if proven true, and lots of people guessing whether it's more likely to be true, or fraud, or not-fraud but a mistake, I've seen practically nobody confidentially saying "this must be true". Have you? And even if you have, it hasn't yet been proven to not be true. So... what's the point of your snide comment?

sillysaurusx 3y ago
I think this logic works the other way around: very few people were saying SBF was absolutely not going to jail, just that it was unlikely. As for LK99, I suppose I’m bummed the hype didn’t pan out. It made me more skeptical of that kind of optimism, and it seemed somewhat related.