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

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

#141

Post by alchemist1e9 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #117
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A version of that probably happened last night with Lk-99, the “Iris” replication claim. Why do think it’s such a problem? Those are the risks of speculating and the market adjusted back downwards in very short order. If Iris was a manipulator the gains were minimal and fleeting. The anti-markets comments all over this are so unfortunate and misguided. By your own logic don’t you just prove that a real lab is now pot…

The base prior (the market price) is that this will not replicate. This scenario is a way to make a quick buck claiming the opposite without doing any actual hard work. In regular markets you can't just say "we increased our sales 1000%" and a week later "oops, sorry, misplaced decimal dot". You can do that in prediction markets.

If you are participating in a prediction market and blindly believe random claims, yes, you will lose your money. As you should.

I don’t understand what you think is different with other markets. Information must be assessed for it’s accuracy and acted on by participants.

In this case I’d even argue the prediction market helped focus attention and resulted in rapid counter analysis that questioned the claims.

Perhaps without the LK-99 markets effects the false information would have had wider and longer reach? The losses of the unskilled participants are a perfectly acceptable cost and in fact beneficial in the long term.

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

#142

Post by dist-epoch »

codethief wrote: post #127
dist-epoch wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

I believe that falls under insider trading.

Conceptually, but not legally.

Insider trading has a very specific definition, which does not apply here. In fact there are huge financial markets, like forex, where insider trading mostly doesn't apply.

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

#143

Post by alchemist1e9 »

mellosouls wrote: post #108
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets reaction from comments across HN? What are good examples of their “disbenefits”?

You don’t observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets reaction from comments across HN? I find HN one of the most balanced online forums on most subjects. What are good examples of their “disbenefits”? The race to the bottom is all around us.

> The race to the bottom is all around us.

You live in SF by chance?

Because globally and historically that’s absolutely not what the data says about markets.

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

#144

Post by DrBazza »

I'm resigned to disappointment for this. It's the modern days Pons and Fleischmann.

Hopefully the lack of confirmation so far is due to people checking, double checking and triple checking, along with a healthy dose of "we don't want to be tarred with the same brush".

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

#146

Post by oneshtein »

jacquesm wrote: post #114
oneshtein wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cold fusion is a hypothesized type of nuclear reaction that would occur at, or near, room temperature. Wikipedia It works at near room temperature. The goal of the reactor in the video is to produce isotopes. It does the job.

It can not ever produce net energy in this setting, so no, it doesn't do the job. It is in a room, but the temperature inside that vessel is anywhere north of 35,000 C. Unless you have a very hot room that isn't 'room temperature' by any stretch of the definition. Note that room temperature is about the temperature of the process not the temperature of the building containing that process.

35kK in this reactor is much closer to room temperature than 150MK in ITER, isn't?

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

#147

Post by rcxdude »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #113
croes wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because markets aren't nearly as clever as is always claimed. Lehmann Brothers anyone?

More like governments aren’t as clever as claimed. The markets would have put all the bad actors out of business permanently and redistributed the resources (like shinny new buildings and engineers) to areas where they would better be utilized. Instead it was turned into an opportunity to launder money at planetary scale. This likely hints to why the truth about the benefits of brutally efficient free markets is dist…

Markets are perfectly capable of rewarding bad actors for a very long time. even if they eventually converge towards reality it's not something that you should assume about a market in any given situation (for one thing, a market is only reflecting the opinions of others about a thing, not the reality of the thing. Even if you think the opinions are on average wrong you don't make money by finding the reality, but by predicting when and how the opinions will change).

I think markets are an extremely useful decision tool in a lot of circumstances but they do still have many failure modes which aren't related to not being 'free enough' (especially w.r.t. regulation it can in fact make markets more efficient as opposed to less, depending on the regulation and the market).

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

#148

Post by RedCondor »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #143
mellosouls wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don’t observe a frequent knee jerk like anti-markets reaction from comments across HN? I find HN one of the most balanced online forums on most subjects. What are good examples of their “disbenefits”? The race to the bottom is all around us.

> The race to the bottom is all around us. You live in SF by chance? Because globally and historically that’s absolutely not what the data says about markets.

Marketers take a lot of credit for achievements that don't belong to them.

Take, for example, Hayek's rather more honest commentary on vacations and human rights generally:

>[The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights] is admittedly an attempt to fuse the rights of the Western liberal tradition with the altogether different concept deriving from the Marxist Russian Revolution. It adds to the list of the classical civil rights enumerated in its first twenty-one articles seven further guarantees intended to express the new ‘social and economic rights’. (…) The conception of a ‘universal right’ which assures to the peasant, to the Eskimo, and presumably to the Abominable Snowman, ‘periodic holidays with pay’ shows the absurdity of the whole thing. (…) What are the consequences of the requirement that every one should have the right ‘freely to participate in the cultural life of the community and to share in the scientific advances and its benefits’. (…) It is evident that all these ‘rights’ are based on the interpretation of society as a deliberately made organization by which everybody is employed. They could not be made universal within a system of rules of just conduct based on the conception of individual responsibility, and so require that the whole of society be converted into a single organization, that is, made totalitarian in the fullest sense of the word.

https://redsails.org/concessions/

The decay we witness today is simply the rollback of concessions copied from socialist states and artificially bolted onto capitalism to reduce socialist ferment. The consequences are predictable.

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

#149

Post by ot »

rcme wrote: post #139
7moritz7 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what is the wordpress post for?

Basically theft. > This is (initially) a copy of Guderian2nd’s table on the discussion thread on Spacebattles with a bit of cleanup. I’ve rewritten most of the notes to be more concise as I track the updates myself, where I can.

How is it theft? The original source is prominently cited, the author of the blog post is an active participant to the original discussion, the whole point of the post is to collect and summarize various sources in one place.

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

#150

Post by TrailMixRaisin »

beowulfey wrote: post #72
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…

A few things: * the paper wasn’t ready, and internal drama is what led to it being released * I’ve read that the process of making it is quite difficult. There probably are not many samples out there in the world Basically, it wasn’t ready for primetime, but I believe it’s close

The topic on how hard or easy it is to replicate seems to be as fast changing as other information. The first time I read about it, it was deemed to be super easy as all you needed are the two base materials and a vacuum furnace. But with all the drama involved I would not be surprised if the process is actually very complicated.
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