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Comment by api | Hacker News Reader

> The bad one consists of sitting in forums and threads being, “the voice of reason”.

I refer to these folks as the "boring universe brigade." The heuristic seems to be that if it's in any way exciting it's probably bullshit. It's a blind overreaction to memetically-optimized pseudoscience.

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How can we forget that- 34 years ago- Pons and Fleischmann made a claim that was incorrect! /s

Isn’t it just a reasonable application of the “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”?

And I say this as someone really hoping that this is true, since I assume this would be great news for renewable energy (and we really need great news on that front)

Well, that position is right 99.9% of the time.

pg: "Being too cynical will cause you to miss out on the most important phase changes."

Defaulting to "no" might get you the right answer the majority of the time, but it also makes you miss the times that "yes" is correct. And correct things that are a radical departure from the status quo are probably the most important and useful to get right.

Skepticism is good (it's still ambiguous whether LK-99 is anything at all), but pessimistic cynicism is not the same thing.

The brain loves an excuse to apply a noise cutting heuristic. There was an article a while back about that being a problem for general physicians, where the problem is usually simple, but very very rarely something serious. A doctor can appear good when they get it right 99% of the time, but they might achieve that by defaulting to “you’re fine, here’s some (ibuprofen/antibiotic/antihistamine/etc)”. Thus, their actual job is to identify that 1% with reasonable accuracy.

By that logic a rock is right 99.9% of the time. I just asked one whether LK-99 will replicate and it said nothing.

Reasonable skepticism is always warranted. I think this thread is talking about reflexive cynicism and instantaneous dismissal.

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