[archepyx]

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]

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.

[worrycue]

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]

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]

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]

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.

[MichaelZuo]

> 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]

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]

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]

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.

[kaba0]

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.

[archepyx]

Optimistic outlook without reasonable skepticism is probably at least something you should not strive to achieve.

[yongjik]

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)" ...

[csours]

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.

[plorg]

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]

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]

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.

[chefandy]

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!

[jcranmer]

As noted by the sibling comment, the physicists (especially those who specialized in superconductor research!) were the ones who were the most skeptical of the announcement, partially because claims of room-temperature superconductors are actually relatively common, and partially because the evidence in the paper was just atrociously bad [1].

One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way. But despite there being ~a week of LK-99 stories permanently on the front page, there wasn't much of that (a little on the initial thread, and virtually nothing for the next several days)--and it's not for lack of physicists commenting on the topic (in other forums)!

[1] I saw someone point out that, when you translate the units on the resistivity/temperature graph, it is a worse conductor than copper at room temperature, below its claimed critical temperature.

[chefandy]

> One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way.

HN is full of subject matter experts on computing-- that is, software, and to a lesser extent, hardware-- beyond that it's a mixed bag at best. Even as an interface designer, I see so much confidently presented and totally bogus pseudo-expertise on art and design here that it's actually kind of funny, and that's much more closely related to software development than physics is. That BS sounds credible to other developers because it's in a developer's voice and trips on misconceptions common among developers. I suspect that's true with the other non-computing topics discussed here that I don't know enough about to give an expert opinion on.

As a long-time developer myself, I've been on both sides of assuming our astonishing intelligence and analytical capability can make up for lacking the requisite expertise. The mistake is expecting the HN crowd's musings about things outside of it's expertise to be more trustworthy than any other internet forum. If this were some physics subreddit or something like that, the criticism would make more sense. This is just people being excited by something a lot of other people were excited by.

[light_hue_1]

> One of the things I look forward to in an HN discussion is the comments of people who can collate expert opinions on the subject and surface these kinds of points in a more ELI15 kind of way.

I can tell you from first hand experience, much of the time subject matter experts are often downvoted into oblivion by the HN hive mind. To the point where you only see clueless people at the top.

Happens to me regularly when it comes to machine learning, neuroscience, education/university threads.

For example, people say crazy things about things like university admissions or grad student salaries. Never mind about ML where most of the information here is just wrong.

[kaba0]

I have no qualms one way or another, but afaik conductivity in small samples is insanely hard to properly measure even when the synthesis process is more deterministic/efficient.

That’s why many started with dimagnetism indeed.

[lamontcg]

> 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.

[chefandy]

So... who cares? Why should laypeople be expected to engage in that much analysis solely to avoid excitement? These aren't policy makers. No lives were lost. Only keystrokes were wasted... and, calling them wasted is probably too harsh. Lots of people learned what a cool thing this would be if it happened, are disappointed that this isn't it, and might even be a little more interested in physics going forward. Why are you so emotionally invested in saying "told ya so"?

[lamontcg]

> This could be a teachable moment that could inform people about climate change, coronavirus and other scientific claims...

I addressed why.

[chefandy]

Imagining that attention to this somehow displaces attention those things is beyond dubious. You could pick literally any popular topic and level the same exact criticism.

[kergonath]

> 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.

[javajosh]

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.

[addisonl]

> HN discussion did not particlarly have "reasonable skepticism".

That’s definitely not true despite your attempts to gaslight us.