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Comment by nwiswell | Hacker News Reader

There are now several authentic videos of bits of rock (lead apatite) appearing to do things around magnets that they have no business doing.

Maybe there's a lot of smoke and no fire, but there's videographic evidence of something weird going on.

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Unfortunately, we live in the age of TikTok. Videos on their own bring no more credibility than written text; they no longer evince a substantively greater investment of resources. I'm more inclined toward the cheerleading section of the LK-99 audience, but watching the videos I realized now is a perfect opportunity to apply recalibrated B.S. detectors.

This doesnt pass the smell test. Why would multiple independent labs fake their videos? What’s the conspiracy here? There is no upside, we will know in a couple of weeks if it’s real or not.

> Why would multiple independent labs fake their videos

Why would different newspapers spread hoaxes? Yet it happens...

newspapers get paid by the click

Which hoax specifically was completely fabricated by the newspapers and spread by multiple newspapers? State run media obviously doesn't count.

Poor source checking and then issuing a retraction is not the same as a conspiracy among the papers to make something up completely.

why would you respond to the question with an unrelated question instead of answering directly?

because incentives are the same

if that were true, you could have answered the question directly

you couldn't, suggesting that it isn't true

by the way, you forgot to respond to [0]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36984443

If it takes X weeks to do research and someone publishes results before that time, then the conclusion that the results are suspect is warranted and is in no way a conspiracy theory.

I didn't mean to insinuate that anybody faked anything. Just that video evidence on its own isn't per se any more credible than if they unambiguously made the same claim in writing. The technology for making fake or misleading videos is easy to come by, so why mentally lean on the fact that they were videos at all? Our answers wrt likelihood of truthfulness simply lie in provenance and other indicia of credibility that would be shared with claims in any other trivially falsified medium, like writing. Why, indeed, would multiple seemingly non-cooperating supposed researchers make the set of claims that have been made?

I don't think anything was faked, nor did I think anything was faked before videos began appearing. But that's precisely why this is an opportune time to exercise recalibrated judgment in not allowing the videographic character to inflate my cautious enthusiasm.

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