[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.