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Comment by jiggawatts | Hacker News Reader

Doesn't anyone working in the physical sciences know how to record a decent video that isn't shaky, blurry, out-of-focus, or a handheld mobile phone recording of a computer screen?

He's using a digital microsocope! Just press the "record" button and upload that!

I can't wait for someone to successfully reproduce it, use a polaroid camera to take the photo, print it out, fax it, and have someone scan in the photocopy, take a photo of the scan from their screen, and upload it to a social media website that'll recompress it and put a watermark on it. Nobel prize winning stuff, right there.

https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/digital_data_2x.png

PS: No, the sample does NOT "levitate". From what little I could see form the shaky and blurry video, it just moves around, like any magnetic substance would. It could be a piece of rusty iron that flaked off something else, for all we know.

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Keep in mind these folks probably haven't slept or taken a shower in a week. I can't imagine the intensity of making a legitimate replication attempt.

I feel like one of the reasons is that it is a lot harder to fake a shaky video than a still one and he won't need to add in his voiceover in comparing to if he is directly recording from the digital microscope presumably.

Yeah, a shaky video is visually convincing and allows for slight-of-hand

If you want your work to mean something, make sure the focus of attention is totally convincing.

Or soothe yourself in knowing all that work is destined to be an unconvincing footnote appreciated, at best, in hindsight

Imagine you have dreamed of some new discovery your whole life. Let's say you are convinced that, I don't know, there exists in the world a naturally bright pink species of cat. You study cats; you know their behaviors, and can guess at the means of finding this elusive pink jungle cat. You search for years to no avail... when suddenly, without prior warning you are on vacation in some remote island and hear a rumor. This pink cat you've searched for is known to the locals, and they can tell you exactly how to find them. You follow the guidance and sure enough -- there they are! The legends are true! You're shaking with excitement and want to document this finding for other pink cat researchers, but you don't have any professional equipment. Just your phone... but any evidence is better than nothing, right??

TL;DR: You are not the intended audience for these videos. They're not trying to convince you -- it's meant for other researchers. We are just seeing the leaks.

My iPhone can take stunning videos. This is not 2010 anymore

Congratulations on owning an iPhone! (I do too, they’re great.) But I want to emphasize that the quality of the phone camera was not the point of that story.

Then what was the point? If I saw a unicorn and took out my phone in a hurry I could get a video of exceptional quality, granted I uploaded it somewhere without too much compression. Seems like you wanted to create a little abstract story ignoring the reality of hardware

Wow, I’ve never thought about it like that before. You’ve done a good job explaining your opinion on this matter! Thanks for the feedback.

I'm not him but I share his confusion. Honestly I can't figure out what sort of point you're trying to make here. What's the point of all the island and pink cats stuff if not to make the point that the researchers didn't have adequate video cameras available to them at the time?

jiggawatts's gripe is that the researchers seem generally incapable of effectively using the cameras they already possess (including iphones), where do pink cats and islands come into this?

Ha, I'll definitely admit it's not the best metaphor. My point was the last sentence of my original comment: when you're in the heat of discovery, witnessing something for the first time, you are NOT thinking about the quality of the video you are trying to capture! These videos were not intended for public consumption -- they were likely sent to a friend or something, showing the exciting thing they were witnessing.

It just irked me that people are looking at this video and thinking that this is a press release or something.

So you never need good data. "They're trying so hard and it looks like what I want! Forgive them!"

This is why people think Bigfoot 3xists after 60 years

We need proof - real and clear data. Reliable data. Reproducible data. Anything else is dismissible, not forgivable.

It feels like bet-hedging:

If LK99 is nothing? Who cares it's a nothing video on the internet.

I'd LK99 is real? Well we know it's true so a bad video of a real thing is real!

Don't run the race and stop two feet from the finish line. Expend the pain and attention to make your effort worthwhile.

> jiggawatts's gripe is that the researchers seem generally incapable of effectively using the cameras they already possess (including iphones)

I’m not sure why there’s an expectation that they know how. Expertise in one subject doesn’t make you capable in others. I’m not sure if you’re ever worked with phds before, but there’s often an extreme contrast in ability and lack of ability, depending on the context.

There’s a good chance these people don’t spend much time messing with their phones.

Yes, that makes sense to me. Lot's of people are simply bad at taking photos, including myself. The isle of pink cats argument doesn't make sense to me though, I'm confused as to what that was even trying to say.

Not if you are on your fifth coffee and super exited about your work.

Re PS: What’s gonna convince you?

What do they say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

This is extremely ordinary 'evidence'

The claim is that the material in the video is the result of a replication attempt by the team at HUST and not something else, like an iron flake. This is their second attempt. Their first attempt failed. They’ve been posting about it all week.

> This is extremely ordinary 'evidence'

Claims don't require special evidence whether they are extraordinary or not. "Extraordinary" claims can be proved with the same kind of evidence as other kinds of claims. Relativity was first tested by taking pictures of an eclipse, pretty pedestrian evidence relative to the cosmic scale of it's implications.

What is true is that, the higher the confidence of your prior belief, the less impact new evidence will have. So extraordinary claims simply require more evidence, because our prior is that they aren't true with fairly high confidence.

The point of that quote is of course not that the evidence must have some mythical flavor or whatever - that would be absurd, but rather that if your prior is a strongly held belief that something is not possible and thus the claim to the contrary is extraordinary, then the evidence sufficient to overturn that prior belief must naturally also be extraordinarily convincing.

It's just standard Bayesian reasoning (apologies if I'm misusing the terminology).

Given how much prior research has been done on superconductors, how attractive a target they are for research, and the demonstrated history of fraud in the field - it's not unnatural to retain skepticism concerning this story.

Doesn't mean the story is fraudulent or falsely believed to be fraudulent; it simply means that more evidence is needed to settle this convincingly. I'm sure will get that soon enough - either way.

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