6 ms·

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 R

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.

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.