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Agreed! There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassmen

Agreed! There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. I had all kinds of exciting conversations about what a validated, commercially viable LK-99 could produce. Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims?

archepyx 3y ago
HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism". This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to accurately judge the technical quality of the initial evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.
- Waterluvian 3y ago
  I find it perilous to treat an entire community as it if has one voice. Ie. "the HN discussion" as a singular entity with a singular binary state on its skepticism. Someone else could equally claim that the HN community was super pessimistic and skeptical about it, because I certainly saw a lot of that too! While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to notice and remember only some of the discourse. Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
  - archepyx 3y ago
    Optimistic outlook without reasonable skepticism is probably at least something you should not strive to achieve.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    > Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error. An optimistic outlook without a semi-plausible basis that you can convincingly elaborate on, or link a vaguely credible source doing so, IS an error, at least going by HN norms.
    - Nevermark 3y ago
      Optimism isn’t gullibility! It is just an attitude that values positive possibilities over fretting about negative possibilities. Especially in cases where there is a small chance of a huge upside, relative to virtually no downside. We didn’t lose any superconductors. :) I don’t recall anyone on HN erroneously declaring the material was definitely a new superconductor before subsequent evidence arrived at a consistent conclusion. There is nothing wrong with optimism.
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        Perhaps you misunderstood? To clarify, I was referring to "An optimistic outlook" in terms of actual assertions/claims/etc. that are written down on-the-record in public. Of course HN users can have the general abstract sentiment of optimism at anytime in their mind. I don't think there are any norms around internal sentiments.
  - imtringued 3y ago
    This superconductor material was the literal definition of something you forget about and then get pleasantly surprised (not excited) about once it is replicated. For the scientists getting their hands on a breakthrough, the risk and reward was worth it, but for the public at large? No one should care until there are definite results.
  - worrycue 3y ago
    The excitable people are certainly “loud” though. The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that maybe the site should be renamed Hype News. > but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error. IMHO it’s best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS until proven otherwise as it’s very easy to concoct BS claims. If we take every one of them seriously, it will consume all of our attention and destroy the signal (actual facts) to noise (unproven claims) ratio on this site.
    - kaba0 3y ago
      I am perfectly capable of managing, simply unknowns, it doesn’t have to have an actual boolean value. Treating it as bullshit is not the correct approach - sure, there is a healthy amount of skepticism, realism to have, but while RTSC is a too nice to be true goal, it is not fundamentally against any known laws, I would retain my bullshit behavior to faster than light travel, the daily tesla-free-energy-for-the-world, etc. kind of low-effort ones, and even in their case would hold a tiny 0.001% chance of my skepticism being wrong.
      - worrycue 3y ago
        It's not about managing unknowns. It's about low information speculation taking up all the information bandwidth crowding out high information factual stuff.
  - pvg 3y ago
    it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error. It's pretty standard to be skeptical of extraordinary, poorly supported scientific claims and you didn't have to be an expert to find out experts were fairly skeptical of this from the beginning and the reasons for their skepticism. The broad HN sentiment was at odds with what you could find elsewhere. This isn't a moral failing or anything, just a common mode of HN-like forums but to elevate it to some some sort of positive rather than a thing to be cautious about seems backwards.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    Also, if anything this black-and-white view of the world is responsible for the bad outcomes associated with optimism in hyped science. If we could distance ourselves from the binary result/truth and simply engage with the topic without that weight, we would have much more productive discussions.
- csours 3y ago
  And the people most likely to join the discussion were the most enthusiastic. It's hard to talk sense when people are excited. See also crypto.
- javajosh 3y ago
  I feel that I had reasonable skepticism based on the consequences to the scientists if they turned out to be wrong. Korea is not known to be a particularly forgiving or understanding culture, and I suspect that all of these men will be working at a fast food restaurant soon.
- chefandy 3y ago
  Jeez— it's almost like few people around here are physicists, consider physicists credible on their specialty, saw physicists excited by the potential, and get excited by exciting things. What a shamefully foolish intellectual failure!
  - lamontcg 3y ago
    > saw physicists excited by the potential, Mostly I saw actual physicists who had experience in the field being very skeptical, throwing a lot of cold water on the fire, and pointing out that the original authors looked like amateurs. And then I saw a lot of people with zero experience in the field running around yelling about how they were out of touch, how this was a revolutionary new way that science would progress on twitter, out in the open, etc. People who were skeptical got called all kinds of names. It didn't help that a lot of people on twitter pivoted from crypto-hype to AI-hype to LK99-hype pretty much on a dime. There was also a lot of highly upvoted comments with the usual thoughtleadering style of "let me beak it down for your, here's the ELI5 of what is going on an what the implications will be..." followed by whatever they learned in the past 48 hours from plowing through wikipedia articles. There could be a lesson here about listening very carefully to experts in the field when they give you their opinions. They often sound very highly biased, but there's usually very good reason for that. Once in a lifetime there's the event where some paradigm is overthrown and all the old scientists look a bit foolish because their instincts were to be skeptical -- but those instincts came through a lifetime of correctly being skeptical 999 times out of 1000 about wild claims in their field. This could be a teachable moment that could inform people about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific claims. If you want to disagree with experts in the field you really need to get off your ass, get off twitter and the blogs, and go do the hard work of understanding what the scientists actually know by reading the articles that they publish. They're very often correct and their opinions hold more weight because they've literally spent their lifetime learning and thinking about this one thing. They didn't start learning about superconductivity / viruses / climate last week and you need to do better than some showerthought or wishful thinking that you think proves your viewpoint. But we're not going to do that because its only been a few days and we've literally forgotten about how much flak scientists were getting on here over skepticism towards the initial claims. And I had some of the most positively stupid arguments on here where people were trying to assert that scientific experts needed to express exactly zero bias because they were experts and held to a higher standard than the average moron with no experience who could argue whatever they liked. Engineering a rationale to be able to reject anyone with a strong opinion based on expertise in favor of strong opinions from randos on twitter.
- addisonl 3y ago
  > HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism". That’s definitely not true despite your attempts to gaslight us.
- yongjik 3y ago
  On the flip side, there was a lot of what I'd call, hmm, "unreasonable" skepticism. If I had a dime every time someone said "This is fake because Korean culture (blah blah armchair sociology)" ...
- kergonath 3y ago
  > HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism" There was a dose of Dunning-Kruger, and some software engineers telling us how to science, but there was also a lot of engagement and interesting discussions with genuine experts. Overall I found it quite interesting to follow. > uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so. It had undertones of small team (in a private institution, no less) taking on the stodgy establishment, which is quite popular among some people here. The concepts are also not very difficult to grasp on surface, so a lot of people can form an opinion, however well founded. People complain about peer review and scientific publisher as well. It is not difficult to see how this could push them to champion something that comes from arxiv.
- plorg 3y ago
  HN demonstrated its common ability to surface prolific posters who identify as autodidacts and appear to have gone on a Wikipedia binge this morning, but who nonetheless speak with a confidence that until now may only have been demonstrated by ChatGPT.
  - morelisp 3y ago
    The absolute worst part is that some of these guys, especially the younger (e.g. fresh grad through ~30) ones, do this in person! I was out drinking with some colleagues a few months ago and I said something offhand in a normal human conversation about wanting to learn more about X, and one guy pulls out his phone and just starts reading me the Wikipedia article about X.
    - plorg 3y ago
      I could personally take or leave live readings of Wikipedia. I wouldn't do it, but I have also gone on my share of solo wiki binges. There's no problem with learning about things. The thing that bothers me is a room full of people with shallow knowledge of a subject who talk over anybody else. I think it's fine to care about things, but I need other people to be able to tune their volume to their level of knowledge and understanding, which you really can't do if you think you know everything.
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
To understand the skeptic's perspective: imagine watching people excitedly discussing a sighting of bigfoot.
SanderNL 3y ago
In a world where true dreamers are often sidelined, where the embrace of change is met with resistance, and where society prioritizes incremental economic evolution over the visions of genuine pioneers, we find ourselves amidst signs and patterns all too indicative of a … culture in decline! rock music
lolinder 3y ago
In this case, I think the excitement and hopefulness was not dangerous or wrong, but I do see a risk to this kind of preprint hype in other contexts. During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion, conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing. Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the impact it will have on society as a whole and on the execution of science in particular. How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?
- okamiueru 3y ago
  I think this kind of excitement followed up with "wasn't anything after all" is both dangerous and wrong. When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be considered science), which then leads the public to have elevated expectations, only then for science to be done right and disprove and reject the original "findings", public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.
  - tysam_and 3y ago
    I think you're conflating PR with the science underneath. PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does. The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and even then, not necessarily guaranteed! D: ---- -- in some potentially very small part -- whatever sphere is around us, and I feel that that's a collective individual responsibility.
    - _lqaf 3y ago
      Furthermore, preemptively reacting to expected third-party behaviors is doomed. Journalists are going to write nonsense, hype-filled science articles. PR flacks are going to hype puff newswire blurbs. Why? Because that's what they're paid to do. You can curse the existence of bad incentives, if you want annoying ideologues to call you a communist. Or you can hire your own PR flacks. Because worrying about how people will react to what you're doing is PR, and going up against professionals without your own is like going to court without a lawyer. Or you can just, you know, do science, accept that people suck sometimes, and get on with your life.
BaseballPhysics 3y ago
> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism... Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck, some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...
kergonath 3y ago
> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. What the general public does not see it the regular flood of papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process itself (“they don’t know what they’re doing”, “they make everything up”, “they write a lot of nonsense”, etc). In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing. People got excited, some of them thought about possible implication, others managed to pick up some notions of material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that. > Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims? You really, really don’t want to be seen as a crack pot when your funding and career depend on how external people evaluate your work. You also really, really don’t want to have to retract a paper because you’ve missed something obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it right.
marginalia_nu 3y ago
> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. This should be taken in the context of room temperature superconductors being notorious physics vaporware along with practically useful advances in quantum computers and useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy grail status, where it's obvious they'd be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.
JeremyNT 3y ago
> When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your comment. The problem is that as lay people we are completely unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no small part by viral videos of outright hoaxes from pseudonymous "researchers." It's fun, in a science fiction-y way, to speculate on what a material with the supposed properties might have meant for the world, but the degree of skepticism that should have been applied was lacking for many. There's a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the newest/latest/best before the general public. But in this case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it was even published without the researchers' consent. There was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at that phase. If people had viewed LK-99's properties as "almost surely science fiction" all along, I could find myself agreeing with you, but that's really not how this played out. Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating, and I guess we can probably expect more of them.
- acqq 3y ago
  > Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating I don't see it as in any way an unique event, and also not unique for the enthusiasm seen on this site. The "believers" in most of the hypes typically aren't cured fast, as the article notes: "While some commentators have pointed to the LK-99 saga as a model for reproducibility in science, others say that it’s an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile puzzle. "Often these things die this very slow death...""
- ummonk 3y ago
  What's "crazy odds of success" to you?
- hackerlight 3y ago
  The tone here on HN was very similar to the tone of a lot of credible physicists. Just because it turned out to be not superconducting doesn't mean that the people you are criticising were wrong to think what they thought given the available information at the time.
ryanSrich 3y ago
My only gripe was the VCs declaring superconductivity without any evidence. They’re so quick to follow the heard and jump on trends that they do zero diligence in just waiting to see if something is legitimate or not. People being hopefully and discussing possible solutions is not a problem. But VCs declaring that it’s the future and you’re falling behind if you’re not working on it is the problem.
fasterik 3y ago
Excitement and curiosity about science is a good thing, but hyping up dubious claims and low quality research is not. I don't know who to blame in this case; I'm not sure whether it's the researchers, science journalism, social media dynamics, or a combination of all those things. But it doesn't seem healthy to have the general public incentivizing scientists to rush out early results with sensationalist claims. Real science takes years to validate results and a lot of that happens behind closed doors, as it should. I think the public reaction in this case is a symptom of a problem with our information ecosystem that extends beyond science. Just because something is fun to participate in in the moment doesn't mean it's not harmful to the underlying scientific/political/social process.
araes 3y ago
Another point is: It's properties might still be interesting (possibly amazing, just not a superconductor). A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy grail. Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at." The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

archepyx 3y ago

HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism". This is probably because people (i) were not aware that there had been many other hypes about RTSC before but less publicly visible all proved to be false, (ii) not being able to accurately judge the technical quality of the initial evidence, (iii) uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so.

Waterluvian 3y ago
I find it perilous to treat an entire community as it if has one voice. Ie. "the HN discussion" as a singular entity with a singular binary state on its skepticism. Someone else could equally claim that the HN community was super pessimistic and skeptical about it, because I certainly saw a lot of that too! While a convenient abstraction, it plays into our biases to notice and remember only some of the discourse. Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error.
- archepyx 3y ago
  Optimistic outlook without reasonable skepticism is probably at least something you should not strive to achieve.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  > Plus I don't think it's really relevant to what I'm saying given I'm not making a claim about how any specific individual or group reacted, but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error. An optimistic outlook without a semi-plausible basis that you can convincingly elaborate on, or link a vaguely credible source doing so, IS an error, at least going by HN norms.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    Optimism isn’t gullibility! It is just an attitude that values positive possibilities over fretting about negative possibilities. Especially in cases where there is a small chance of a huge upside, relative to virtually no downside. We didn’t lose any superconductors. :) I don’t recall anyone on HN erroneously declaring the material was definitely a new superconductor before subsequent evidence arrived at a consistent conclusion. There is nothing wrong with optimism.
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      Perhaps you misunderstood? To clarify, I was referring to "An optimistic outlook" in terms of actual assertions/claims/etc. that are written down on-the-record in public. Of course HN users can have the general abstract sentiment of optimism at anytime in their mind. I don't think there are any norms around internal sentiments.
- imtringued 3y ago
  This superconductor material was the literal definition of something you forget about and then get pleasantly surprised (not excited) about once it is replicated. For the scientists getting their hands on a breakthrough, the risk and reward was worth it, but for the public at large? No one should care until there are definite results.
- worrycue 3y ago
  The excitable people are certainly “loud” though. The last few weeks with the LK-99 hype combined with the usual ChatGPT stories, I actually started feeling that maybe the site should be renamed Hype News. > but that it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error. IMHO it’s best to treat any extraordinary claim as BS until proven otherwise as it’s very easy to concoct BS claims. If we take every one of them seriously, it will consume all of our attention and destroy the signal (actual facts) to noise (unproven claims) ratio on this site.
  - kaba0 3y ago
    I am perfectly capable of managing, simply unknowns, it doesn’t have to have an actual boolean value. Treating it as bullshit is not the correct approach - sure, there is a healthy amount of skepticism, realism to have, but while RTSC is a too nice to be true goal, it is not fundamentally against any known laws, I would retain my bullshit behavior to faster than light travel, the daily tesla-free-energy-for-the-world, etc. kind of low-effort ones, and even in their case would hold a tiny 0.001% chance of my skepticism being wrong.
    - worrycue 3y ago
      It's not about managing unknowns. It's about low information speculation taking up all the information bandwidth crowding out high information factual stuff.
- pvg 3y ago
  it's odd when there's people who treat an optimistic outlook as an error. It's pretty standard to be skeptical of extraordinary, poorly supported scientific claims and you didn't have to be an expert to find out experts were fairly skeptical of this from the beginning and the reasons for their skepticism. The broad HN sentiment was at odds with what you could find elsewhere. This isn't a moral failing or anything, just a common mode of HN-like forums but to elevate it to some some sort of positive rather than a thing to be cautious about seems backwards.
- kaba0 3y ago
  Also, if anything this black-and-white view of the world is responsible for the bad outcomes associated with optimism in hyped science. If we could distance ourselves from the binary result/truth and simply engage with the topic without that weight, we would have much more productive discussions.
csours 3y ago
And the people most likely to join the discussion were the most enthusiastic. It's hard to talk sense when people are excited. See also crypto.
javajosh 3y ago
I feel that I had reasonable skepticism based on the consequences to the scientists if they turned out to be wrong. Korea is not known to be a particularly forgiving or understanding culture, and I suspect that all of these men will be working at a fast food restaurant soon.
chefandy 3y ago
Jeez— it's almost like few people around here are physicists, consider physicists credible on their specialty, saw physicists excited by the potential, and get excited by exciting things. What a shamefully foolish intellectual failure!
- lamontcg 3y ago
  > saw physicists excited by the potential, Mostly I saw actual physicists who had experience in the field being very skeptical, throwing a lot of cold water on the fire, and pointing out that the original authors looked like amateurs. And then I saw a lot of people with zero experience in the field running around yelling about how they were out of touch, how this was a revolutionary new way that science would progress on twitter, out in the open, etc. People who were skeptical got called all kinds of names. It didn't help that a lot of people on twitter pivoted from crypto-hype to AI-hype to LK99-hype pretty much on a dime. There was also a lot of highly upvoted comments with the usual thoughtleadering style of "let me beak it down for your, here's the ELI5 of what is going on an what the implications will be..." followed by whatever they learned in the past 48 hours from plowing through wikipedia articles. There could be a lesson here about listening very carefully to experts in the field when they give you their opinions. They often sound very highly biased, but there's usually very good reason for that. Once in a lifetime there's the event where some paradigm is overthrown and all the old scientists look a bit foolish because their instincts were to be skeptical -- but those instincts came through a lifetime of correctly being skeptical 999 times out of 1000 about wild claims in their field. This could be a teachable moment that could inform people about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific claims. If you want to disagree with experts in the field you really need to get off your ass, get off twitter and the blogs, and go do the hard work of understanding what the scientists actually know by reading the articles that they publish. They're very often correct and their opinions hold more weight because they've literally spent their lifetime learning and thinking about this one thing. They didn't start learning about superconductivity / viruses / climate last week and you need to do better than some showerthought or wishful thinking that you think proves your viewpoint. But we're not going to do that because its only been a few days and we've literally forgotten about how much flak scientists were getting on here over skepticism towards the initial claims. And I had some of the most positively stupid arguments on here where people were trying to assert that scientific experts needed to express exactly zero bias because they were experts and held to a higher standard than the average moron with no experience who could argue whatever they liked. Engineering a rationale to be able to reject anyone with a strong opinion based on expertise in favor of strong opinions from randos on twitter.
addisonl 3y ago
> HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism". That’s definitely not true despite your attempts to gaslight us.
yongjik 3y ago
On the flip side, there was a lot of what I'd call, hmm, "unreasonable" skepticism. If I had a dime every time someone said "This is fake because Korean culture (blah blah armchair sociology)" ...
kergonath 3y ago
> HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism" There was a dose of Dunning-Kruger, and some software engineers telling us how to science, but there was also a lot of engagement and interesting discussions with genuine experts. Overall I found it quite interesting to follow. > uncritically believing that the data in the initial preprints was proof for superconductivity because their authors said so. It had undertones of small team (in a private institution, no less) taking on the stodgy establishment, which is quite popular among some people here. The concepts are also not very difficult to grasp on surface, so a lot of people can form an opinion, however well founded. People complain about peer review and scientific publisher as well. It is not difficult to see how this could push them to champion something that comes from arxiv.
plorg 3y ago
HN demonstrated its common ability to surface prolific posters who identify as autodidacts and appear to have gone on a Wikipedia binge this morning, but who nonetheless speak with a confidence that until now may only have been demonstrated by ChatGPT.
- morelisp 3y ago
  The absolute worst part is that some of these guys, especially the younger (e.g. fresh grad through ~30) ones, do this in person! I was out drinking with some colleagues a few months ago and I said something offhand in a normal human conversation about wanting to learn more about X, and one guy pulls out his phone and just starts reading me the Wikipedia article about X.
  - plorg 3y ago
    I could personally take or leave live readings of Wikipedia. I wouldn't do it, but I have also gone on my share of solo wiki binges. There's no problem with learning about things. The thing that bothers me is a room full of people with shallow knowledge of a subject who talk over anybody else. I think it's fine to care about things, but I need other people to be able to tune their volume to their level of knowledge and understanding, which you really can't do if you think you know everything.

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

To understand the skeptic's perspective: imagine watching people excitedly discussing a sighting of bigfoot.

SanderNL 3y ago

In a world where true dreamers are often sidelined, where the embrace of change is met with resistance, and where society prioritizes incremental economic evolution over the visions of genuine pioneers, we find ourselves amidst signs and patterns all too indicative of a … culture in decline! rock music

lolinder 3y ago

In this case, I think the excitement and hopefulness was not dangerous or wrong, but I do see a risk to this kind of preprint hype in other contexts. During COVID there were multiple cases like this where a study got a lot of hype and discussion from non-experts and turned into "the science says X", when in fact the science was as of yet extremely unsettled. Sure enough, as the experts came to a consensus it rarely matched the public's initial perception, which led to a lot of confusion, conspiracy theories, and fingerpointing. Science-as-spectator-sport is fun, but I worry about the impact it will have on society as a whole and on the execution of science in particular. How many research decisions will be influenced by the possibility of going viral? How many bad decisions will be made as a result of pressure from millions of non-experts who briefly become armchair X-ologists?

okamiueru 3y ago
I think this kind of excitement followed up with "wasn't anything after all" is both dangerous and wrong. When science is done badly (which arguably shouldn't be considered science), which then leads the public to have elevated expectations, only then for science to be done right and disprove and reject the original "findings", public trust in science is ever so slightly damaged.
- tysam_and 3y ago
  I think you're conflating PR with the science underneath. PR is something we cannot control -- and avoiding releasing results in a (semi-vain?) attempt to control PR arguably does more harm than releasing them does. The sea makes waves as it will. We can moderate as much as we are able. I think the rest is simply a matter of accepting that things happen as they do out of our control. We can only truly impact ---- and even then, not necessarily guaranteed! D: ---- -- in some potentially very small part -- whatever sphere is around us, and I feel that that's a collective individual responsibility.
  - _lqaf 3y ago
    Furthermore, preemptively reacting to expected third-party behaviors is doomed. Journalists are going to write nonsense, hype-filled science articles. PR flacks are going to hype puff newswire blurbs. Why? Because that's what they're paid to do. You can curse the existence of bad incentives, if you want annoying ideologues to call you a communist. Or you can hire your own PR flacks. Because worrying about how people will react to what you're doing is PR, and going up against professionals without your own is like going to court without a lawyer. Or you can just, you know, do science, accept that people suck sometimes, and get on with your life.

BaseballPhysics 3y ago

> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism... Kinda buried the lede there. A lot of folks around here and in my own orbit were practicing the former while excluding the latter, or worse, were taking shots at people trying to inject some level of rationality into the conversation. Heck, some folks even went so far as to refer to those types of counterpoints/comments as just a "bizarre reaction"...

kergonath 3y ago

> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. What the general public does not see it the regular flood of papers that pretend to change the world and that turn out to be bogus. So, from an insider point of view, the issue is that what we are supposed to avoid (crack pot theories becoming mainstream or getting too much traction) happened in a spectacular fashion. So a lot of people get excited about nothing and then end up distrusting the scientific process itself (“they don’t know what they’re doing”, “they make everything up”, “they write a lot of nonsense”, etc). In this case, I think it turned out to be a good thing. People got excited, some of them thought about possible implication, others managed to pick up some notions of material science. The enthusiasm and activity from people trying to replicate and investigate the material was heart-warming. But yeah, it was bound to finish like that. > Why would I ever be inclined to feel that there's pie on my face now that we've got fairly strong evidence refuting the claims? You really, really don’t want to be seen as a crack pot when your funding and career depend on how external people evaluate your work. You also really, really don’t want to have to retract a paper because you’ve missed something obvious. Retraction is a traumatic process even if you are in good faith. This is sidestepped by releasing preprints (so no peer review and no risk of retraction). But at the same time this is a reason why outlandish preprints tend not to be taken too seriously. There is less incentives to get it right.

marginalia_nu 3y ago

> There's this bizarre reaction I see from many where they see the excitement and curiosity and hopefulness as a form of error and source of embarrassment. When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. This should be taken in the context of room temperature superconductors being notorious physics vaporware along with practically useful advances in quantum computers and useful fusion. What these have in common is a sort of holy grail status, where it's obvious they'd be a revolutionary complete game changer. Not that any of these things are obviously impossible, there's just been so many instances of discoveries in these areas that have failed to replicate that there's inevitably a lot of eye rolling in physics when these types of findings are announced.

JeremyNT 3y ago

> When mixed with an open mind and reasonable skepticism, it's a powerful opportunity to get people engaged in imagining a different world. I feel like this line is doing a lot of lifting in your comment. The problem is that as lay people we are completely unequipped to gauge a claim like this. I followed along on HN and there were plenty of posts by people who were giving LK-99 crazy odds of success, fueled in no small part by viral videos of outright hoaxes from pseudonymous "researchers." It's fun, in a science fiction-y way, to speculate on what a material with the supposed properties might have meant for the world, but the degree of skepticism that should have been applied was lacking for many. There's a tendency on HN and similar forums to devour new developments - almost a fanaticism about learning the newest/latest/best before the general public. But in this case, a truly extraordinary claim had been proposed, and it was even published without the researchers' consent. There was precious little reason to give it any attention at all at that phase. If people had viewed LK-99's properties as "almost surely science fiction" all along, I could find myself agreeing with you, but that's really not how this played out. Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating, and I guess we can probably expect more of them.

acqq 3y ago
> Sadly this event showed there's a market for hyping up weak claims that people will be poor at evaluating I don't see it as in any way an unique event, and also not unique for the enthusiasm seen on this site. The "believers" in most of the hypes typically aren't cured fast, as the article notes: "While some commentators have pointed to the LK-99 saga as a model for reproducibility in science, others say that it’s an unusually swift resolution of a high-profile puzzle. "Often these things die this very slow death...""
ummonk 3y ago
What's "crazy odds of success" to you?
hackerlight 3y ago
The tone here on HN was very similar to the tone of a lot of credible physicists. Just because it turned out to be not superconducting doesn't mean that the people you are criticising were wrong to think what they thought given the available information at the time.

ryanSrich 3y ago

My only gripe was the VCs declaring superconductivity without any evidence. They’re so quick to follow the heard and jump on trends that they do zero diligence in just waiting to see if something is legitimate or not. People being hopefully and discussing possible solutions is not a problem. But VCs declaring that it’s the future and you’re falling behind if you’re not working on it is the problem.

fasterik 3y ago

Excitement and curiosity about science is a good thing, but hyping up dubious claims and low quality research is not. I don't know who to blame in this case; I'm not sure whether it's the researchers, science journalism, social media dynamics, or a combination of all those things. But it doesn't seem healthy to have the general public incentivizing scientists to rush out early results with sensationalist claims. Real science takes years to validate results and a lot of that happens behind closed doors, as it should. I think the public reaction in this case is a symptom of a problem with our information ecosystem that extends beyond science. Just because something is fun to participate in in the moment doesn't mean it's not harmful to the underlying scientific/political/social process.

araes 3y ago

Another point is: It's properties might still be interesting (possibly amazing, just not a superconductor). A significant reduction in room temperature resistance would still be incredible, even if it wasn't a "room temperature superconductor." Might still enable a lot of those "exciting conversations." Just not some binary yes/no computer holy grail. Also, big effect was scientists went "Whoa. There's a whole mode/regime of resistance change we never really looked at." The modeling papers that came out almost immediately were really interesting. Might still have cool applications.

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