In a week there will be a lot of thinkpieces on how the internet got this so wrong. A lot of people just want to believe, full of hope, because their life situations (poverty, housing crisis, hot weather) are so dire.
The shallow dismissal reaction is taking for granted that it's not real and everyone's wrong to give it a chance. The thing is, almost everything is wrong—you can rely on this almost completely, and placing your bet on "wrong wrong wrong" achieves a high batting average—you'll be right almost all the time. The trouble is that your expected value will be zero, and you will be both bored and boring (I don't mean you personally—this is a common pattern and we all do it to some extent).
It's in the low-probability/high-impact quadrant that the interesting things reside, alongside crank material and dross, and it's not easy to tell them apart. That's natural. But one thing we can be sure of is that rejecting everything in that quadrant is a sure way to fail in the long run, and probably also to keep oneself in a bad mood.
There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical, but I remain hopeful. All the theoretical critiques are extra interesting if this is real and the data is basically accurate.
I enjoy HN most in times like this.
As with many things now, there are that small set of people who need to pick a "position" early and then stake a part of their ego on it. Which is super weird and destructive, and underlies many of the bad tendencies of the web.