Hacker News Reader

Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

LK-99 sensationalism and especially online sensationalism is an excellent example of everything that's bad about rapid communication and the attention economy. A huge number of people suddenly feel a need to have a hot take opinion on cutting edge superconductor research, apparently including nature authors. There's a false sense of urgency around trying to understand a possible discovery that even if true, wouldn't impact anyone's life for many years, and will probably never be relevant to an actual decision they have to make.

Things will pan out or they won't. What's the rush to form an opinion and hop on a hype bandwagon. I'm probably just a curmudgeon, but the whole thing seems to be more about social signaling than anything else.

Maybe I find it so distasteful because I think the hype and jumping to conclusions is antithetical to real science and understanding.

View on HN

So in regular one on one in person conversation, you can show your "presence" by uttering a simple "mmhmm" or "yeah" or "I understand" when someone is telling you something above your expertise. Humans like to be heard even if it's just an utterance. There's nothing like this online though. Imagine if we allowed posts on hackernews where you just say "cool" or "mmhmm". It adds no value to the conversation. So rather than being quiet and being silent or adding no perceived value to the convo, we come up with misguided opinions because "at least someone needs to hear me" is a thought that goes through our minds.

I mean heck, I could have not written this post.

I thought that's what the upvotes are for.

Upvotes are for what you consider interesting or added value.

That seems to be their theoretical use, much like the downvote is theoretically supposed to be their inverse.

In practice though, it seems that the users of most online communities seem to treat them as an "agree or disagree" button, with dissenting opinions typically being either forced out of a thread or languishing due to the upvote-downvote tug of war generally suppressing a comment's rankings.

This is a more articulate description of something I’ve been thinking of for a while. Tweets, and maybe just internet comments in general, are like a stream of consciousness momentary thought response. Rarely is it a fully formed opinion, but instead it’s an instantaneous opinion that might have left as quickly as it came. Someone insults my cup holders, and I kind of like my car, the cup holders are fine, but for an instant I feel slighted. Then I see they have so many upvotes, and their wrong opinion is being spread. Now it’s my duty to inform the world of the quality of these cup holders, and defend my honor. They can’t just be wrong, they have to be completely wrong, so out comes the exaggerated response. And then, as quickly as it came on, it’s forgotten, and I don’t even notice the next time I use the cup holders that they are kinda shit.

That’s common, but it’s also an artifact of how few topics people are experts in.

The chances of two people on HN happening to both be experts in superconductors or even condensed matter physics / automotive design / … is higher than normal. But there’s a rapid drop off in expertise so most people commenting don’t really understand the specifics.

So, rather than people arguing about the tradeoffs of cup holder placement and material choices etc it just devolves into “Ug like tribe! Things good! Back off!”

With Tesla it seems to revolve around who has Tesla stock, who drives one, who doesn't and who doesn't have Tesla stock and then finally there is your personal attitude towards Elon Musk. That gives you an eight way fight with every faction behaving utterly predictable. I suggest we enumerate the factions and add them to our bios that way we can at least discount that factor.

I think this is a really good analogy for exploring my emotions on the topic.

There are people who make utterances because they want to show they are paying attention, and there are people who make them because they cant stand not being heard. To me, the latter is more distatsefull than the former.

I think it is gross that in the attention economy, the drive for existential validation is reduced to posting "cool" to be seen, and clicking an upvote feels like being part of a conversation. In some sense they are, but it just a very streched and hollow manifestation of human interaction and participation.

My likely arrogant and possibly hyprocirtical conceit that I think what I post into the void is more interesting and substantial than "cool". Still, that doesnt change my feeling on the subject.

This is why I love love love reaction icons. First used these a lot in Slack but now I want them on everything. People can feel like they've acknowledged something (and even provided their sentiment to it if they want) without having to feel like they need to provide an opinion.

100% agreed. Reaction emojis are a huge innovation in online participation, and they serve a lot of the same functions as non-speech behaviors do in group conversation.

I'm in one large Slack where people have contributed an extensive library of custom reaction emojis and it's great. The place has a strong culture and a lot of great in jokes all expressed in relatively few pixels of screen real estate and relatively few seconds of comprehension. It also diverts a lot of energy from what would otherwise be low-value comments.

> Things will pan out or they won't. What's the rush to form an opinion and hop on a hype bandwagon

Because it's fun and exciting watching smart people from around the world collaborate/compete around an interesting and world-changing idea. It's cool and good that many people are invested and interested in science and technology.

The really smart people so far aren't barely saying anything about it.

The people who have spent all their lives researching superconductors have yet to weigh in on this at all.

> The really smart people so far aren't barely saying anything about it.

Publicly. But they are saying stuff and it isn't all negative but very, very carefully hedged and qualified.

I think it's a mistake to think that the only people with useful opinions are experts in the field. While still leaving much to be desired, Science education has gotten much better in the last 50-60 years and i find I've been pleasantly surprised how discerning the public is about bad science recently.

The thing about this experiment is that it really is accessible. It's something most people could imagine themselves doing and the observable is fairly clear we with like a few minor caveats with simple things to try that even refute those! People are resonating with that. Let them for gods sake.

Plus the elegant simplicity should give the result and the amateur replications more credence and yet we have these weird kneejerk reactions against them by scientists who act seemingly threatened, I wonder if that is just insecurity about their own corpus. Any scientist who won't admit to having some stinker data that they pushed through is probably lying or has like, one publication. And many have a career that is all stinkers.

Maybe I didn't articulate things very well. I'm for fun and excitement, and think following and learning about science does both of those.

What I think is weird is the need to feel that you as an individual are part of the action or moment, and insert yourself into it. It's kind of like the person who watches the football game on TV and thinks that their personal ritual and enthusiasm will change the outcome.

It's weird that people feel an urgent need need to converge on an opinion about superconductivity experiments as if there opinion will shape the future outcome and make it so

Something exciting is happening, of course people want be informed as it evolves.

A similar example are election nights. People already voted, the result is in the box, we could simply wait and announce the result.

But seeing the numbers rise like an ongoing fight is going on makes for a more entertaining evening!

I think politics would be a lot better if people treated it less as a source of emotional engagement or as a spectator sport.

Don't get me wrong, I'm for fun, excitement, and curiosity.

What turns me off is that once the shallow well of real information depleted, how quickly people switch to speculation, Hype, and attention seeking

You essentially want people to stop being people. We are for want of a better term meme machines and we pass on information that we find interesting, gives us hope or makes us feel better and we avoid the opposite because it eventually makes us feel worse.

Yes but we can try to be selective about what we treat as a meme. People have that ability, although it is diminishing with the speed of communication these day.

That is a very interesting observation. I've always likened it to the diminishing cost of communication but your insight may well be the better one.

j_maffe took the words out of my mouth.

I would also say that in addition to diminishing cost and discretion, there are changing incentives/rewards structures with online communication.

Maybe. I think the point is valid but in the traditional media there is plenty of ways in which the incentives and rewards lead to pathological behavior, especially with TV but also with some forms of print.

I totally agree that there are always incentives at play! I'm not even trying to make the claim that they're worse, although I do believe that.

One of the new incentives more at play with modern media is using a sense of social visibility, community, and belonging as a reward. Well sometimes true, I think that for the most part it is false or at least very shallow.

Someone shouting at or praising a book, newspaper, or TV rarely felt like they were part of something bigger and making a difference.

New Media enables these feelings in a way that I think is exaggerated, and leads to a different type of pathological Behavior.

To take an example, I think that some people, on some level, feel that posting some mundane comment about superconductivity makes them feel more part of the science, history, and Society. It is a subtle satisfaction of a need to validate ones on existence. I know this all sounds very Freudian, and it probably is. But my central objection is that this gratification is just a new form of junk food for the mind, leaving people malnourished and ultimately dissatisfied.

It's basically a psychological trap, like someone satisfying their need to learn with a tweet instead of reading a book. Not everything needs to be a book, but some people trick themselves into thinking they're a scholar after reading a tweet.

That's true. It is something I'm observing with kids around me: they don't learn from books, they hate to read, but they consume video like there is no tomorrow, wherever and whenever they can. Inane stuff, but also really bad stuff as well as good stuff. Getting them to be selective is hard, but it is far less hard than to try to get them to read.

I really struggle with this, I would love to get my kids to read more (they are the ones I can influence the easiest) but it's very much an uphill battle. Their peer group is just like them, and 'reading is for old people' is pretty much how that whole generation sees it. They may well be right and I'm probably tilting at windmills but I'll keep trying. I wouldn't know how to get through life or run a business without my literacy and ability to write, it's what allows me to absorb knowledge far faster than I could do from any other means of communication. Video, in comparison, sucks. It is so low in information density that unless the subject is something where video actually enhances the information it is a distraction and bloat.

Yeah I think that's another way of viewing what I'm saying. Different levels of information density I'm fine with, but what concerns me is that the median itself is rarely conducive to nuance and detail. Even some of the top tier educational videos gloss over things that make the conclusions conditional or even completely incorrect. It has the appearance of authoritative knowledge, but if you take it at face value you'd have a completely inaccurate understanding of the subject matter. I'm a scientist myself and watched what I thought was a fascinating and detailed 30 minute video about power transmission last night. I had a question so I clicked through to written description of the phenomenon which explained it in one paragraph and completely invalidated the video.

I worry about my kids in the world if people lose the expectation of detail

It's sad that the current assumption is that we have no power to change ourselves or our world. We're not machines, we are human beings, agents; we control what we do.

Collectively we have a lot of power, individually much less.

I agree, but that's always been true and yet we are communicating on HN and not wandering the savannah trying not to starve.

I think there is justifiable view here that people these days are getting more and more addicted to making prediction. We predict everything but we forget most of it will be just a coin toss cause for every 1 factor we consider, 100 more are unconsidered.

I think more and more people are using politics as some sort of substitute for sports and/or religion, especially post-pandemic when a lot more people were exposed to political ideas when spending time online.

There definitely is an attention economy… I would go further and say people are addicted to consuming news.

But this

> A huge number of people suddenly feel a need to have a hot take opinion on cutting edge superconductor research, apparently including nature authors.

I don’t understand. People are going to share their thoughts. Most wont be experts. So what? Is someone supposed to stop this? Are no one but experts supposed to care? Or try and make sense of it?

You're right. Of course, getting excited on the media is fine. But people are acting as if their words can help protect something from someone, which is disconnected from reality. Things unfold either way, regardless of whether people care about it or not. The real future is not sympathetic to predictions.

Recently Nature and Ars published articles about LK-99, and in both cases it seems to me that a) they couldn't allow themselves to keep silence about a hot topic; b) they successfully didn't answer a question is it a real room temperature superconductor or what. They did exactly what I expected them to do, they described the current state of affairs with all its uncertainty.

And based on this I do not think that they felt the urgency to choose an opinion. At least they didn't choose between "yes" and "no".

As for twitter and reddit I personally didn't bother to look what happens there. I see here on HN people who reduces the issue to a question is it a real thing, ignoring issues like the rules of science dictating what must be done before science can reach a conclusion. I believe it is much worse on reddit, where people generally have less insight into how science works as a social institution.

> Maybe I find it so distasteful because I think the hype and jumping to conclusions is antithetical to real science and understanding.

People have a lot of fun generating and watching videos of different levitating objects. They have a lot of fun arguing about these videos. It has nothing to do with science, though they can believe otherwise. I'm ok with that. It is better then when they choose an other topic to agrue. Something from social or political issues is much worser.

I don't know why but this comment sort of unveiled to me how much useless hype I had for this topic. Of course you're right, it's just so easy to indeed get this sense of urgency, even though it's not really a good use of time (even for entertainment).

This. My small brother tried to explain to me, an electrical engineer, why this will change the world.

I then had to give him a rundown of things that would need to happen before there ever could be a widespread adoption of the material in common household wiring. First it needs to replicate, then a lot of research has to happen on the properties, then manufacturing processes have to be explored and created, suitable insulator materials have to be found, the price point of the sold wire has to be low enough, ...

Hope for a better future is a good thing, but WHY does it always have to come in the form of technological silver bullets these days? Because then we don't have to change our way of living?

Don't get me wrong, a room temperature, ambient pressure superconductor would be revolutionary and (provided it can be manufactured and used without a ton of hassle) it would transform the world. But it would still probably take two decades and there are so many other fronts on which we as a humanity have failed.

"But it would still probably take two decades"

Two decades is a lot of time. Transistors or airplanes got to a useful form much faster, in a less wealthy world with many fewer engineers.

This is just people understandably getting excited about a huge discovery. What type of people would we be if such moments didn't get us going?

OK, well the rest of us still have opinions and emotions and like to share them with other people, never mind your distaste. But thanks for sharing!

This guy captured the excitement pretty well:

https://twitter.com/gbrl_dick/status/1685811395273830401?t=z...

> wouldn't impact anyone's life for many years

Might not impact it hardly at all.

Sensationalism? No way, LK-99 will be part of the EmDrive! /s

Reply on news.ycombinator.com