Hacker News Reader

Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

They're citing a study from the International Center for Quantum Materials at Peking University in Beijing (which has several Alumni from the Condensed Matter Theory Center at U of Maryland which is the twitter account) which goes into the matter in some depth and finds that chunks of the material are ferromagnetic and some chunks are diamagnetic and the whole thing is a semiconductor. They also replicate the half-levitation effect from the original video and which some people have replicated:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.03110.pdf

The twitter account may have had a biased tone because they're actual experts and qualified to have a strong opinion.

View on HN

Strong language doesn't usually correlate with qualification. They sprouted the same harsh tone badmouthing video streaming a couple of days ago.

> Strong language doesn't usually correlate with qualification.

I never asserted the converse.

Pointing out that strong, biased language can be associated with expertise and therefore in isolation has no bearing on truth, isn't the same as saying that strong, biased language is always associated with expertise.

In fact I just argued that strong, biased language associated with ignorance is generally bad, and is much worse than biased language coming from experts.

> They sprouted the same harsh tone badmouthing video streaming a couple of days ago.

Depending on what they were saying, I might agree with them that they have a point, that statement is rather vague. The video streaming of LK-99 synthesis turned out to be not very useful or enlightening in the end. It settled nothing and created a spectacle--people felt more informed that they could watch it, but at the end of the day they weren't better informed. The preprint from ICQM looks fairly definitive.

But do they claim to be an expert in video streaming? Probably not. Which means how you view their opinions on the two different subjects -- video streaming and superconductivity -- can and should be different.

Imho being an expert doesn't allow you to be biased. I would say that the more expert you are in a topic the less biased your voice should be.

That is sort of nonsensical. Being ignorant and biased is a lot worse than actually knowing what you're talking about.

Being an expert and being biased on purpose implies acting in bad faith.

Being biased due to ignorance is not a big deal since in principle no one is going to pay you attention anyway.

> Being an expert and being biased on purpose implies acting in bad faith.

That doesn't even make any sense to me. Like I don't know what to say because I can't understand what you could possibly be trying to say.

It sounds like you're struggling hard to create a world where experts need to just shut up while ignorant people get to post whatever hottakes they like. That seems to obviously result in a dystopia of information to me.

> Being biased due to ignorance is not a big deal since in principle no one is going to pay you attention anyway.

Well that's clearly false, since we just watched in real time all kinds of strong hottakes from people who had spent the weekend researching superconductors on wikipedia getting wildly upvoted here and on twitter because people wanted to believe.

IMO that is actually bad because that is how you can delude people and how propaganda can manipulate a population.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com