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Comment by soligern | Hacker News Reader

Now I don’t know what to believe.

Why do you need to believe anything at this point. Unless you regularly dance at the bleeding edge of material science, either sit back and enjoy the show, or change the channel and watch something else.

Yeah, with things like these, I prefer the watch something else option. It doesn't matter how many of these arxiv papers and dubious twitter videos I look at, I still won't know the answer until there's a scientific consensus. Until then, I see no point in investing any effort. I'm not a physicist. There's no way this information will materially affect my life in the next several years. And there's a pretty huge chance it will never affect my life at all(if it disappears).

It is fun to watch the absolute torrent of confirmation bias and people changing their minds all the time in the comments though. Must be exhausting to constantly wax and wane like that.

Conversely, why wouldn't someone believe something if there are no consequences to being wrong?

As you say, unless you regularly dance at the bleeding edge of material science, nothing you believe really matters, so why not jump in with both feet?

Because it leads to a habit of getting overly excited about every press release.

And then burning out when too many of them turn out to be nothing and deciding no progress ever gets made.

This begs the question; why "overly", why not just "excited"?

For some of us, being wrong is its own consequence.

Seems like a great way to paralyze oneself.

It can manifest like that, sure. It's not up to me, though. "Great ways" to do things are usually optional.

I mostly can work with it. It helps make me very good at certain tasks.

What’s funny is that you’re not actually executing as you describe, just that you think you are.

If you indeed waited for all relevant information, you’d never be able to make a choice. You, like every single other healthy human (some humans can’t do this) use emotion to decide when you’ve gathered enough information.

The only difference here is some are aware of this process and some aren’t.

Eventually such a practice will bite you in the ass when you form an opinion on something you think doesn't matter, but actually turns out to matter.

This presumes all of your opinions are wrong, and further presumes you'd hold these beliefs strongly when information changes, which is the very definition of irrational.

So yeah, if you act irrationally, you will make bad decisions. But it's not irrational to believe something loosely based on a very limited set of facts.

Because the act of the believe doesn't affect reality. Either u have a robust way to make the right judgement of the progress (in the case u r at the forefront of the research and knows what they r talking about), or u r just a bystander.

In the later case, the is no point in overthinking

Or you take what information you have at the time and you evaluate a situation based on just that, which is exactly how real life decisions work.

Rarely, exceedingly rarely even, do you have the luxury of waiting for all of the facts before deciding something.

In this case that means you have the physics expertise to actually understand what's going on, which I already mentioned in the previous post. Not everything is accessible to layman, in this particular case the bar is very high.

My best answer is I don't know. If you are knowledge enough, go ahead

Nope, no expertise necessary. What I do have an expertise in is risk management however, and the cost of being wrong here is effectively zero, so in cases like that there is no reason to act so cautiously, and in fact it's costly to have such a low tolerance for risk in a situation like this.

I'd say the cost being wrong depends on the people. For a lot of people being in the state of unknown is better than random guesses with 0 expertise. Not everyone like to flaunt their ignorance

Not sure why r u so insist that only your way is right. That's ur choice of course

The fear of being wrong is a crippling one that haunts ineffective people. Effective people don’t care, because they know they can update their beliefs when new information is introduced.

You’re talking about pride. Prideful people are not effective.

You're all forgetting that you can change your mind when new information becomes available, and you can express your belief in terms of certainty.

The original scientists said that only 10% of their synthesis attempts were successful.

So at this point no one should be believing anything until we have a lot more evidence.

Wait till tomorrow when there will be a new not peer reviewed paper stating the contrary. [edit:grammar]

Sure, but you really think peer review would solve any of that? It would only make things move 1000x slower and be worse.

The current "free-market" process of replication attempts is going to resolve the issue both quicker and with more statistical significance than peer-review ever could.

Perhaps this isn't what you're implying, but the peer-review word in your comment jumped out to me, as if that changes anything.

> with more statistical significance

You can't take a dozen lousy studies and put them together to get better statistical significance than a single well-designed study. If the methodology of a study is bad, the results have to be scrapped entirely, and peer review is supposed to be the process through which we filter out bad methodology.

Without peer review we don't know which studies to eliminate from our informal meta-analysis, which means we can't come to any conclusions about the data.

Peer review _is_ a free market solution to the problem of incorrect research.

lol, and now it's not tomorrow, it's today

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37043447

Superposition of it's over / we are so back.

Patience. Just that. It will come out, either positive, or negative, but as long as it is inconclusive there is only patience. No need to get jubilant, no need to be jaded or 'cool'. Just wait.

You are believing and disbelieving something based on a title.

I'd wait for Nobel prize.

Who is to say there will be one? And if there is one, then there is no need to wait for it. Typically those are awarded after we're all very much aware of what they are awarded for.

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