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Comment by winter_blue | Hacker News Reader

Why would someone do something like this? He’s essentially going to become persona non grata in the scientific community. His career in science is basically over.

On top of that, according to a Reddit thread, he raised $20 million in VC funding for his “room-temperature superconductor”. Due to the deception, he’s likely going to not only lose any money, but likely face federal securities fraud (and other fraud) charges.

He’s literally looking at prison time right now.

The baffling stupidity that could cause someone engage in such idiotic (and self-destructive) conduct is perplexing, to say the least.

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> The baffling stupidity that could cause someone engage in such idiotic (and self-destructive) conduct is perplexing, to say the least.

...and yet, here I am, refactoring unsanitized parameters.

I'm not in a research field but I feel like someone looking for and then raising $20M in funding has already taken a very large step onto that slippery slope.

If I had $20M looking over my shoulder at my lab results I would feel a certain obligation to "perform" — or certainly to appease.

At first I can imagine data is legit but maybe a bit "curated" for the client. Later some data is dropped altogether. Maybe conditions are tweaked to get more promising looking data. Results that have an error range are penciled in to one end of the range or the other to, again, show more favorable results.

Naively I assumed there was a "purity" to research that would not even start on the path to looking for cash. Grants, on the other hand, as I understand them, don't have the same assumptions of showing a profit.

Yeah that's an obvious question for people who _don't_ do this kind of stuff. Similar behavior by other people, like George Santos or SBF, come to mind - I think a big part of it is Ego and probably another mental disposition like severe narcissism or something. The frustrating thing about these questions is we'll never really know the answer, even if these individuals told us why we'd be hard pressed to believe them.

The Laws of Human Stupidity (Carlo Cipolla):

1: "Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation." Do not be fooled by traits assumed to be exclusive of stupidity such as education or career.

2: "The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person."

3: "A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses." The corollary is that the exact nature of stupidity is difficult to predict and therefore guard against. (Refer to the QZ article covering these laws for an interesting graph comparing stupid people to all other types of people.)

4: "Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances, to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake."

5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person - more dangerous than an intelligent but selfishly-motivated actor.

> he raised $20 million in VC funding for his “room-temperature superconductor”

Did they tell the VCs the "room temperature superconductors" needs to operate under more pressure than you'd find in the center of the Earth?

Pressure that is well within humanity's capability to produce and maintain at small-ish scales (not intercontinental transmission lines, but within a factory). 100x less pressure than the previous record. If these results were real, it would absolutely be an enormous scientific leap forward and lead to new technologies, and I don't see a reason to minimize that. Of course, it's all fabricated bullshit, so I guess it's a moot point.

edit

RPI is pretty legit. Or at least, it was back when I was in college

RPI? RPI = Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute which is not mentioned in the article. The researcher is from the University of Rochester.

ah, I was responding to that mention in my parent comment and assumed it was correct, but now that comment says "edit" so presumably it was a faulty assumption

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