Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

forums.spacebattles.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 659 posts

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#81

Post by Turskarama »

toth wrote: post #54
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #20

Saw some people hyping up markets where people are betting on prediction markets whether or not LK-99 will replicate. Can't help but feel like that money would be better spent just paying off some labs to actually try to replicate the process. The response I got from a predictions market enthusiast was that having a sufficiently large market would motivate people to attempt to have the process replicated and buy opti…

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…

LK-99 is a brand new material that almost nobody knows anything about. The market is not a knowledge aggregate, it is vibes based.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#83

Post by tinco »

throw0101a wrote: post #76
toth wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…

What do these prediction markets produce ? Some people are saying "yes" and others are saying "no", and the answer is either "yes" or "no", but why bother spending money on predicting when society can spend money on replicating it? Wouldn't an actual replication attempt be more useful? > The latter is a perfectly reasonable thing to do - it's not easy for an average person to "pay off some lab", but if they provide l…

They're producing the wisdom of the crowd, which is a real and highly accurate piece of information. It's quite difficult and expensive to produce information as fast and reliable by other means. And they don't cost much, it's mostly money being moved around.

edit: I interpreted it as asking wether prediction markets in general produce value. In this specific case I'm 100% with you, they're absolutely useless in predicting wether this finding is going to replicate or not.

BTW probably 100% useless is going to be better than trusting a single reply in a HN thread. Even averaging out a group of replies on HN is going to be pretty bad, probably worse than averaging out a group of replies on Reddit.

The idea of wisdom of the crowd is based on the idea that knowledge about a topic (both false and true) is roughly normally distributed (as many things are in nature), so the averaged result of a large group of answers is likely to be close to the real answer, as long as there are no external factors pushing the whole distribution left or right.

Also, the final result is not going to be the answer if it's gonna replicate, but more the odds of it replicating (i.e. the odds of a paper like this being legit). The odds could be 1 in a million, and it still wouldn't affect the reality of LK-99 being super conductive or not.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#85

Post by tomrod »

oneshtein wrote: post #70
ggm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not "cold fusion" that's low energy fusion. It explicitly has surplus neutrons and radioactivity. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_electrostatic_confi... It's energy consuming. It's just lower energy than other methods, and it's emphatically not cold fusion.

Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR), AKA Cold Fusion.

When someone mentions cold fusion, they are explicitly referencing a net energy-producing process that operates at room temperature. That isn't what you are referencing.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#86

Post by dist-epoch »

toth wrote: post #54
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #20

Saw some people hyping up markets where people are betting on prediction markets whether or not LK-99 will replicate. Can't help but feel like that money would be better spent just paying off some labs to actually try to replicate the process. The response I got from a predictions market enthusiast was that having a sufficiently large market would motivate people to attempt to have the process replicated and buy opti…

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…

How about this scenario:

I am the PI of a laboratory. I buy up the market and (falsely) announce that I succeeded in replication. Sell and make profit. Then a couple of days later I announce that I made a terrible mistake.

How do you prevent this scenario? I did nothing illegal, I just "not noticed the mistake I made".

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#87

Post by alchemist1e9 »

toth wrote: post #54
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #20

Saw some people hyping up markets where people are betting on prediction markets whether or not LK-99 will replicate. Can't help but feel like that money would be better spent just paying off some labs to actually try to replicate the process. The response I got from a predictions market enthusiast was that having a sufficiently large market would motivate people to attempt to have the process replicated and buy opti…

This type of instictive negative reaction to prediction markets is, unfortunately, common, but, I think, misguided. Prediction markets are one of the (or just, the?) best ways of aggregating knowledge from multiple sources and producing the best predictions. Having good legible predictions of impactful events such as LK-99 replication is extremely useful for society - it would be an invaluable input for a savvy polic…

Absolutely and people might be interested that in this case the prediction market for LK-99 is reacting in real time to new tweets from people trying to replicate. The “yes” spike to 32c yesterday was in response to a twitter account posting an image of a levitating grain in a tube. The credibility of that replication attempt was then evaluated by many and the market backed off afterwards.

There is always a subtle anti-markets theme on many HN debates, likely from highly educated ans literate posters. I believe we still in this age simply don’t provide proper education on the massive benefits that markets bring to so mang problems. They are literally the nervous system of our incredible global organic economy.

In this case, why in world would you have something against prediction markets?

Is it fascinating the risk of a nuclear weapon detonation by December 31st of 2023 is accessed to be around 9%?

If anything we need to liberalize laws around prediction markets. Currently they are relagated to off shore and various backwaters. The CME should be listing tbese types of markets ideally and institutional money hiring top analytical talent would then participate.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#88

Post by antupis »

askvictor wrote: post #59
antupis wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stone Age Bronze Age Iron Age I would add Steel Age here LK-99 Age

Given that human flight and putting things in space rely on Aluminium, I think that's worth a mention too.

I was thinking steel reinforced concrete but yeah Aluminium or Silicon would fit here also.

Re: LK-99: The live online race for a room-temperature superconductor

#90

Post by alecst »

I’m not an expert, but I’ve used superconductors (I believe YBCO) when I taught physics lab. We cooled samples down with liquid nitrogen and put them over a magnet. They levitate, but not like in the video that the Korean team released. True superconductors enjoy “flux pinning”, meaning wherever you put them on a magnet, they’ll freeze in that position (or move around an axis of constant flux.) In the LK-99 video that they released, they show that the sample is repelled by a magnet. This seems to contradict the HTS claim and wondered if I’m missing something because surely so many experts can’t be this wrong.

My background is in physics, but not superconductors.

Post reply on HN