4 ms·

> As for "possible", the behind-the-scene post makes it clear it is false modesty. It's not false modesty to withhold a conclusion that is unwarranted without

> As for "possible", the behind-the-scene post makes it clear it is false modesty. It's not false modesty to withhold a conclusion that is unwarranted without more evidence. The last time this happened there was also "possible Meissner effect" that turned out to be diamagnetism. There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired.

sigmoid10 3y ago
>There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired. That's true, but one upside here is that this is not from the guy at Rochester who already got burned twice for publishing false superconductor discoveries. This is at least a report that can't be dismissed immediately.
- hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
  I don't know who you're referring to "from Rochester", but the excitement from last summer around LK-99 came from two South Korean researchers. Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data. To be clear, I don't mean to cast unnecessary shade on these current results, I'm just saying the sane and prudent thing to do, especially given LK-99's recent history, is to hold off on any champagne popping, and that appropriate restraint shouldn't be characterized as "false modesty".
  - godelski 3y ago
    > Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data. Which we should be critical of, but understandable, since that's one of the main reasons to publish (and why I think it is weird we say arxiv papers aren't peer reviewed. That was probably one of the most peer reviewed works in the last decade) and since we're all human. Science is full of mistakes, and is unsurprising when a lot of it is literally trying to do things that humans have never done before (much more to science than this too). What I thought was really cool about LK-99 is that it isn't too often that people get a first hand look at what goes on inside the science communities. An abnormal amount of attention and openness, but illustrative. Just not sure this is the takeaway people got. But I saw science working in action, and it was really cool.
  - floxy 3y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranga_P._Dias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranga_P._Dias
  - wiz21c 3y ago
    Extraordinary claim should be backed by extraordinary tests. So why do they publish if they're not 100% confident ? Why not wait to be certain ?
    - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
      > So why do they publish if they're not 100% confident ? Why not wait to be certain ? There are very good reasons to publish before one is "100% certain". It can get lots of other scientists to evaluate your information where they can try to reproduce it or poke holes in your theories. It just makes sense to do that with a tone of "We got some interesting results..." as opposed to what happened in the summer which was more like "We've made one of the biggest discoveries of mankind!!!"
      - vlovich123 3y ago
        Yeah, there’s a very good argument I’ve read from researchers that instead of papers we should be publishing continuously what our results are to encourage this early and often community interaction/feedback (ie more like code reviews). The reason it doesn’t happen is publish/perish + needing to be first to publish (ie someone taking your work and beating you to the punch and getting all the credit).
        micromacrofoot 3y ago
        more live-streamed science, fewer pdfs
      - Retric 3y ago
        Getting other people to inspect your work sounds great for you but it costs those people a time and money. So, the incentives for misuse are really high and the net result is that shortcutting the process is a net drag on progress. People remember the bigs stuff like FTL neutrinos, cold fusion, NK-99, etc but arguably this also shows up as part of the ‘reproducibility crisis’ in many fields.
    - WhitneyLand 3y ago
- civilized 3y ago
  The guy from Rochester is Ranga Dias. He is a fraudster. Here are a couple news reports on his behavior: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/controversial-physicist-faces-mounting-accusations-of-scientific-misconduct1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/controversial-phy... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/science/superconductor-retraction-ranga-dias-rochester.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/science/superconductor-re...
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
godelski 3y ago
> There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired. There are, but I'd agree that there aren't downsides we should be concerned with. The downside is that if you're trying to publish the work that it can make it easier for the work to be rejected. I'd agree this is dumb, but it is a thing I've seen happen, and be not too uncommon. Just comes down to metrics: academics are judged by citations and number of papers published, thus papers are written to reviewers as opposed to peers (not necessarily the same thing, but assumed they are), also incentivizes flashy results to generate more publicity, or overselling the novelty of work (sometimes even by mistake). But otherwise I agree, and I think it should be encouraged to take a more tempered approach (I think it'll also really help build back social trust in sciences (again, small part of a larger pie)).
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  > The downside is that if you're trying to publish the work that it can make it easier for the work to be rejected. I think that given the subject, if this pans out there is no chance they'll get rejected.
  - godelski 3y ago
    For this particular example, sure. I mean for this particular subject you'd have to hand in a really bad paper to get rejected, like past unintelligible, because the breakthrough is big. But I thought we were talking in general. There's also very clear downsides to this particular example by not being exceptionally cautious, because even a hint of hype can make them look like incompetent fools if they aren't correct. Though that wouldn't be good either because they clearly aren't. It's easy to make mistakes in science and even as I frequently told my friends last time, there was something different here and it'll probably end in failure (which it did) but that we'll learn something important (which looks likely to be true given this paper).
ChuckMcM 3y ago
I was reading the paper and thought "Okay, these folks took the LK-99 lesson to heart about being overly enthusiastic in your experimental observations." :-) Given that the LK-99 theoretical underpinnings were pretty solid (if not the implementation) I've been watching papers in this space. (on google scholar you can just track papers that cite the LK-99 paper as new follow-ups)

sigmoid10 3y ago

>There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired. That's true, but one upside here is that this is not from the guy at Rochester who already got burned twice for publishing false superconductor discoveries. This is at least a report that can't be dismissed immediately.

hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
I don't know who you're referring to "from Rochester", but the excitement from last summer around LK-99 came from two South Korean researchers. Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data. To be clear, I don't mean to cast unnecessary shade on these current results, I'm just saying the sane and prudent thing to do, especially given LK-99's recent history, is to hold off on any champagne popping, and that appropriate restraint shouldn't be characterized as "false modesty".
- godelski 3y ago
  > Which, mind you, all turned out to be faulty interpretation of their data. Which we should be critical of, but understandable, since that's one of the main reasons to publish (and why I think it is weird we say arxiv papers aren't peer reviewed. That was probably one of the most peer reviewed works in the last decade) and since we're all human. Science is full of mistakes, and is unsurprising when a lot of it is literally trying to do things that humans have never done before (much more to science than this too). What I thought was really cool about LK-99 is that it isn't too often that people get a first hand look at what goes on inside the science communities. An abnormal amount of attention and openness, but illustrative. Just not sure this is the takeaway people got. But I saw science working in action, and it was really cool.
- floxy 3y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranga_P._Dias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranga_P._Dias
- wiz21c 3y ago
  Extraordinary claim should be backed by extraordinary tests. So why do they publish if they're not 100% confident ? Why not wait to be certain ?
  - hn_throwaway_99 3y ago
    > So why do they publish if they're not 100% confident ? Why not wait to be certain ? There are very good reasons to publish before one is "100% certain". It can get lots of other scientists to evaluate your information where they can try to reproduce it or poke holes in your theories. It just makes sense to do that with a tone of "We got some interesting results..." as opposed to what happened in the summer which was more like "We've made one of the biggest discoveries of mankind!!!"
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      Yeah, there’s a very good argument I’ve read from researchers that instead of papers we should be publishing continuously what our results are to encourage this early and often community interaction/feedback (ie more like code reviews). The reason it doesn’t happen is publish/perish + needing to be first to publish (ie someone taking your work and beating you to the punch and getting all the credit).
      - micromacrofoot 3y ago
        more live-streamed science, fewer pdfs
    - Retric 3y ago
      Getting other people to inspect your work sounds great for you but it costs those people a time and money. So, the incentives for misuse are really high and the net result is that shortcutting the process is a net drag on progress. People remember the bigs stuff like FTL neutrinos, cold fusion, NK-99, etc but arguably this also shows up as part of the ‘reproducibility crisis’ in many fields.
  - WhitneyLand 3y ago
civilized 3y ago
The guy from Rochester is Ranga Dias. He is a fraudster. Here are a couple news reports on his behavior: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/controversial-physicist-faces-mounting-accusations-of-scientific-misconduct1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/controversial-phy... https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/science/superconductor-retraction-ranga-dias-rochester.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/science/superconductor-re...

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

godelski 3y ago

> There are no downsides to being conservative until more evidence is acquired. There are, but I'd agree that there aren't downsides we should be concerned with. The downside is that if you're trying to publish the work that it can make it easier for the work to be rejected. I'd agree this is dumb, but it is a thing I've seen happen, and be not too uncommon. Just comes down to metrics: academics are judged by citations and number of papers published, thus papers are written to reviewers as opposed to peers (not necessarily the same thing, but assumed they are), also incentivizes flashy results to generate more publicity, or overselling the novelty of work (sometimes even by mistake). But otherwise I agree, and I think it should be encouraged to take a more tempered approach (I think it'll also really help build back social trust in sciences (again, small part of a larger pie)).

idopmstuff 3y ago
> The downside is that if you're trying to publish the work that it can make it easier for the work to be rejected. I think that given the subject, if this pans out there is no chance they'll get rejected.
- godelski 3y ago
  For this particular example, sure. I mean for this particular subject you'd have to hand in a really bad paper to get rejected, like past unintelligible, because the breakthrough is big. But I thought we were talking in general. There's also very clear downsides to this particular example by not being exceptionally cautious, because even a hint of hype can make them look like incompetent fools if they aren't correct. Though that wouldn't be good either because they clearly aren't. It's easy to make mistakes in science and even as I frequently told my friends last time, there was something different here and it'll probably end in failure (which it did) but that we'll learn something important (which looks likely to be true given this paper).

ChuckMcM 3y ago

I was reading the paper and thought "Okay, these folks took the LK-99 lesson to heart about being overly enthusiastic in your experimental observations." :-) Given that the LK-99 theoretical underpinnings were pretty solid (if not the implementation) I've been watching papers in this space. (on google scholar you can just track papers that cite the LK-99 paper as new follow-ups)