Why do you need to believe anything at this point. Unless you regularly dance at the bleeding edge of material science, either sit back and enjoy the show, or change the channel and watch something else.
Yeah, with things like these, I prefer the watch something else option. It doesn't matter how many of these arxiv papers and dubious twitter videos I look at, I still won't know the answer until there's a scientific consensus. Until then, I see no point in investing any effort. I'm not a physicist. There's no way this information will materially affect my life in the next several years. And there's a pretty huge chance it will never affect my life at all(if it disappears).
It is fun to watch the absolute torrent of confirmation bias and people changing their minds all the time in the comments though. Must be exhausting to constantly wax and wane like that.
Conversely, why wouldn't someone believe something if there are no consequences to being wrong?
As you say, unless you regularly dance at the bleeding edge of material science, nothing you believe really matters, so why not jump in with both feet?
What’s funny is that you’re not actually executing as you describe, just that you think you are.
If you indeed waited for all relevant information, you’d never be able to make a choice. You, like every single other healthy human (some humans can’t do this) use emotion to decide when you’ve gathered enough information.
The only difference here is some are aware of this process and some aren’t.
This presumes all of your opinions are wrong, and further presumes you'd hold these beliefs strongly when information changes, which is the very definition of irrational.
So yeah, if you act irrationally, you will make bad decisions. But it's not irrational to believe something loosely based on a very limited set of facts.
Because the act of the believe doesn't affect reality. Either u have a robust way to make the right judgement of the progress (in the case u r at the forefront of the research and knows what they r talking about), or u r just a bystander.
In the later case, the is no point in overthinking
In this case that means you have the physics expertise to actually understand what's going on, which I already mentioned in the previous post. Not everything is accessible to layman, in this particular case the bar is very high.
My best answer is I don't know. If you are knowledge enough, go ahead
Nope, no expertise necessary. What I do have an expertise in is risk management however, and the cost of being wrong here is effectively zero, so in cases like that there is no reason to act so cautiously, and in fact it's costly to have such a low tolerance for risk in a situation like this.
Sure, but you really think peer review would solve any of that? It would only make things move 1000x slower and be worse.
The current "free-market" process of replication attempts is going to resolve the issue both quicker and with more statistical significance than peer-review ever could.
Perhaps this isn't what you're implying, but the peer-review word in your comment jumped out to me, as if that changes anything.
You can't take a dozen lousy studies and put them together to get better statistical significance than a single well-designed study. If the methodology of a study is bad, the results have to be scrapped entirely, and peer review is supposed to be the process through which we filter out bad methodology.
Without peer review we don't know which studies to eliminate from our informal meta-analysis, which means we can't come to any conclusions about the data.
Patience. Just that. It will come out, either positive, or negative, but as long as it is inconclusive there is only patience. No need to get jubilant, no need to be jaded or 'cool'. Just wait.
Who is to say there will be one? And if there is one, then there is no need to wait for it. Typically those are awarded after we're all very much aware of what they are awarded for.