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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

Many on HN have the same response to many things in every domain, not just research.

For being a tech entrepreneur forum people here are strangely very anti science and technology. The top voted responses to every new product announcement are essentially "why do we need this? Pen and paper work just fine".

In my experience, the more someone has deep understanding in tech, the more they are critical of it. Especially true in my field of infosec.

Yes, it's called counter-signaling.

I think as people gain experience, they can start substituting experience and cynicism for actual first principles thinking and curiosity.

Everyone is a cynic simply because cynicism is easy. Any infosec professional can go "computers are insecure, never use them". And the advice will be correct, but ultimately useless. The ones worth anything won't just point out problems but also find solutions.

> the more someone has deep understanding in tech, the more they are critical of it.

I think the criticism comes mostly from people with just a little knowledge, trying to sound and feel like they know more. Just a few talking points or principles enable you to criticize, but not seriously analyze (much less create).

That's because for 90% of new products, the old stuff performs better, uses fewer resources, and has been debugged in ways the new stuff has not.

All the new stuff, however, has marketing and looks shiny.

The problem is this might be true, but it will not always be true. The horse was probably better than the first cars for a while, but progress changed that.

If you are always a naysayer you will be right 90% of the time and can feel smug and pat yourself on the back for it (so, like everyone here). However, progress comes from people willing to take risks and make wild bets for the small chance that they are in the 10%.

And they will succeed around 1% of the time.

In fusion research, pessimism is realism. Especially in laser powered fusion.

This experiment is producing 2.5 MJ of output for 500 MJ of input.

Roughly once a day.

After decades of basic research.

It's a scientific breakthrough in the sense that the rocks are now being banged together hard enough to make sparks. And a little more is known about rock banging than was known ten years ago.

But it's clearly not going to be producing power on a commercial scale any time soon.

Aside from the particular percentages I don't exactly disagree with your observation about the odds of being right or wrong in the respective cases, but I think the skepticism being due to an lazy pursuit of this smugness and self-congratulation you describe is almost entirely flawed as an explanation of motivations.

Instead, I'd like to suggest, in addition to having with cumulative exposure developed a severe hype allergy, a lot of us are burnt with respect to that so-called progress. There's been a fair bit of outright corrupted delivery on the promise of new technology, not least IT, and many people here are savvy enough to see the costs of wrongheaded changes.

'Move fast or not, we don't care much, but back off breaking things we liked and leaving the rest of us picking up the shards.'

Old computers perform better and use fewer resources? Have you used, say, a PC in the 90s? The fans were loud, the power usage constant and high, and the performance lacking by so many orders of magnitude that it can just be emulated in software today.

Cars, TVs, phones, take your pick.

Do you realize what that represents?

Rather, very anti science and technology hype. Many visitors of this website measure experience by decades, and have seen many waves of hype resiting in not much progress in unyielding areas, from self-driving car and silver-bullet methodologies to, well, commercial fusion.

When demonstrable, measure progress is achieved, visitors of this site get very excited and positive, from things like the Rust language all the way to solar power and reusable rockets.

A breakthrough is a qualitative change, not (merely) quantitative. 95% to 96% of reaction energy output is a nice but quantitative advance. 99% to 101% is a qualitative breakthrough: suddenly, it's a surplus, actual generation.

We are still far away from the latter, alas.

This is the very opposite to silver bullet approaches to fusion, though. This is a methodical, military-industrial-complex style development that was decades in the making.

I think it’s just the Zeitgeist. Social media has trained us that a certain reasoning style is rewarded, quick takes that don’t dig into the first principles and instead serve as shibboleths that you’re not one of THOSE types of unintellectual pseudo tech bros who bought NFTs or whatever.

Not really convincing since Rust is 99% hype from people who misunderstand C++ and are just happy to join an "inclusive" cult

I have plenty of experience and I don't agree that it's about hype. IMHO it's about the standard human reactionary response to something new and challenging [0], and people trying to sound smarter than something or someone by criticizing. It is disappointing.

[0] The saying is true IME: First they laugh at it (ridicule it), then they say it's not in the Bible (conflicts with the norm), then they say they believed it all along.

Products better have sn answer to that question, and that answer tends to be very informative.

Most people in tech are cynical about tech because they intimately know the vision is waaay further out than reality, they know the breed and sometimes the names of the squirrels running in the wheels making it work, and have gone through more figurative duct tape and baling wire than most developing nations.

There's a bias for empiricism. People don't believe stuff until there's 50 years worth of data and 1000 politically correct and carbon neutral peer-reviewed papers on it. It must be approved by ethical panels and experts on TV. Only then it becomes science™.

Yeah its the same here about most new technology like ai and improvement in solar and battery technology. One thing I have noticed is that some of the most vocal people have formed their opinions years ago and now they are not aware or ignore all the changes/improvements that have occured since.

That's not completely true, but has a lot of truth in it.

Everyone formed their opinion about eg. Blockchain a long time ago.

But they do admit that eg. Gpt-3 is pretty advanced, but has it's own flaws.

On fusion energy and battery technology I see plenty of cynicism, but given the history of wildly over-stated "advances" in both fields I think people are justified in leaning towards pessimism.

The reality of course falls short of the most optimistic projections, but e.g. for batteries: look around! Wealthy countries at least are now full of little gadgets that couldn't have existed even a few years ago due to the battery demands. A walk down any street in NYC you'll see probably 5-8 different personal transportation systems that are pretty close to sci-fi.

I agree on batteries, but something like half a dozen Manhattan projects worth has been spent on fusion research so far and we don’t seem anywhere remotely close to achieving even a fraction of its promise. I remember reading about the future of fusion energy in my teens, and now my daughters are coming out of their teens. And I had kids late. I’m sorry but technical break even just doesn’t cut it for me at this point.

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