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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Over unity, infinite compression algorithms, perpetual motion machines, tidal energy (unless you think subsidy is the goal in itself) and so on.

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Which smart people believed in infinite compression algorithms or true perpetual motion?

More than one that I've personally known. They miss just a tiny sliver of theory and they believe that their smarts are large enough to be able to see something that everybody else must have missed.

Various folks into the 21st century.

Edit: point taken.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_perpetual_motion_...

He lived 2 centuries before Newton, 3 centuries before Laplace, 4 centuries before Maxwell and 5 centuries before Noether, Einstein, and Shannon. That he doesn't believe the first law of thermodynamics is hardly his fault.

And all of those names effectively built on a foundation that Da Vinci helped establish. It wasn't modern science just yet but it was a massive step up from what came before.

And in a way that is probably his biggest contribution: to show that if science focuses on that which works and can be generalized there will be massive progress. Because for a single individual, especially in that age his output was extremely impressive and that couldn't have worked if he didn't channel his energy to areas that were deemed to be fruitful.

Well he lived before modern laws of physics were known… I'm not sure that counts.

Actually: he was instrumental in inspiring others to search for those modern laws of physics and at that point such experiments must have helped to figure out where exactly the line was culminating in the laws of thermodynamics.

The replies don't make a ton of sense, did you change the contents of your comment?

Yes, the comment was changed considerably. Originally it gave Leonardo Da Vinci's attempts to create a perpetual motion machine as an example of a smart and successful person falling for a dumb idea.

Even in the source it says he was against such ideas.

> Leonardo da Vinci made a number of drawings of devices he hoped would make free energy. Leonardo da Vinci was generally against such devices, but drew and examined numerous overbalanced wheels

Just drawing some stuff that looks like perpetual machine isn't the same as actually believing in it. In fact this is how science should work. Even if something has a small chance to be correct try that and think about it. Einstein didn't believed in black holes but thought about breakdown of his equations.

That source wasn't there in the first version.

Cold fusion is posted here every few months. Does it fall in this category?

Ah yes, that one too.

On that note, the entire LK-99 debacle.

But super conductors do exist and room temperature superconductors may be possible. Nobody has ruled that out at all.

Yeah but why did so many people take those guys so seriously before their work was replicated? Shouldn’t extraordinary claims be filtered early before we give them the time of day?

I'm pretty sure that most people that have a basic idea of materials science were simply intrigued (myself amongst them) because there wasn't anything that ruled it out and it seemed like a potentially promising path. And obviously: the truth would come out anyway given enough time. The HN threads of the time make for interesting reading: I think a lot of people approach technological progress from the point of something very close to wishful thinking, their enthusiasm isn't proportional to the likelihood of the thing being true but to the perceived good a particular invention would do if it were real. And that then overwhelms any kind of reasoning ability. Incidentally: that may well be as good an answer as I can provide to the original question posed by this article.

I would contend that everyone discussing LK-99 took it very rationally. The idea that there were people "falling for it" is made up post-facto by a group who want to feel smugly superior about everything.

Cynicism isn't wisdom though.

No, lots of people were falling for it and were twisting themselves into all kinds of knots that were not supported by evidence. And lots of people were similarly twisting themselves into all kinds of knots to claim it couldn't possibly true. And neither position was supported by evidence or physics.

You should go back and read the comment threads. People were incredibly level headed (actually tripping over themselves to make sure everyone knew how skeptical they were).

You are missing the point of the article.

People gobbled it up with the justification that random researchers on twitter "replicated" the results under the assumption that these anonymous researchers are putting their entire career on the line and therefore should be paid attention to. That is literally playing into the point the article is making. I.e. people believing lies because the information came from a higher status individual.

Some did, but not everybody did. I recall those threads vividly and I tried very hard to keep an even keel and to keep it all grounded in evidence. But a lot of wishful thinking happened as well as categorical rejection and these had the same element in common: a lack of evidence. Though the categorical rejection faction had history on their side I still think that that's just an argument from statistics without any relevant insight in to the subject matter.

Come on, that was fun and engaging. A floating rock is pretty harmless.

The funniest part of that whole debacle was watching side liners in HN get their ego personally hurt when it was exposed.

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