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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

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 I think we are all too aware of markets and their benefits and disbenefits. It's not clear why you think the "education" is missing only in one direction.

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

Any number of the many, many, negative externalities[0], where market transactions are unable or unwilling to capture the often serious negative effects of an activity in its price, that have been documented and researched by economists over the years? Air pollution and greenhouse gases are just two of the biggest examples, with absolutely massive external costs that are not captured in the price. There are even positive externalities with various activities where societal benefits can't be captured in the price.

Regulatory capture[1] and rent-seeking are also examples where markets can fail. There are plenty of others.

Markets are just tools for the exchange of economic activity. Nothing more, nothing less. But as a society, we tend to ascribe all sorts of greater meaning to them that make it harder to recognize where they come up short and actually do something about it. If knee-jerk anti-market reactions are bad, then might I propose that knee-jerk pro-market reactions are just as bad, insofar as they gloss over or outright ignore the negative aspects of markets as we've implemented them?

Imagine a screwdriver. It does one job: turn a screw. If you have the right one, matched with the corresponding screw drive--let's just assume a Philips screw--at the right size, it does its job perfectly. But it'll get less effective as the tip and screw sizes diverge. What about other screw drives? There are a bunch of types where a Philips will sort of fit, and you'll probably be able to turn the screw, albeit with more effort and a greater likelihood of camming out and damaging the screw or your screwdriver. A flat-head screwdriver gets used and abused in all sorts of fun and interesting ways. You can use a flat-head screwdriver to pry open a can of paint, but an actual paint can opener is still less likely to distort or damage the lid or slip and injure you. At some point, you open the tool box and grab another tool. Maybe it's another screwdriver, because you're turning another screw. Or maybe it's a different tool altogether, one designed for the specific task at hand.

Markets aren't so different, if not quite as narrowly-defined as a screwdriver. They work well in some areas, less well in others, and in some, they simply can't function. All to varying degrees. Recognizing their failures and limitations allows us try and develop policies that address their worst parts while maintaining their more desirable parts.

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

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

#182
post #22
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming LK99 is legitimate, my hope is that the principles that make it work are more broadly applicable - and with that, refined production processes or newer alloys can be found. Simply knowing that it's possible would lead to a huge amount of research immediately focusing on this kind of thing. There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughou…

> There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughout our history after them :) (Stone age, etc) I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone.

I think the Ice age came before the stone age - can't imagine those tools lasted very long - so Stone tools would have been a big advance :-)

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

#183

I've been live following this thread: https://twitter.com/iris_igb/status/1685731177523449856

This thread is super frustrating. The person posting it does not at all seem interested in actually demonstrating the effect works... how can you have such a sample and only post this one image which could easily be created by gluing a pebble to the glass? Where's the video of it in action! I want this material to be real so badly.

To be fair a video could also be faked and they explain why they're not doing videos and that if you want a replication just wait for the big labs.

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

#184
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There's nothing more revolutionary than a discovery of a new class of materials. After all, we often name eras throughout our history after them :) (Stone age, etc) I wonder what was involved in the discovery of stone.

Being in the wrong place, at the wrong time. ;)

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

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What system isn't capable of rewarding bad actors for a long time?

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

#187
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…

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 an…

Prediction markets got Donald Trump wrong on the election night and Brexit too[0].

Given such a huge failure why should we care what they say?

[0]: https://archive.li/7m8s6

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

#188
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…

In what way would the people in the prediction markets fund a replication? That's not something that normal people just do. And if I wanted to do that, I don't even know how.

And society doesn't spend money. People do.

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

#189
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…

Don't act like markets and government are independent entities. The markets influenced the government in their favor long before Lehmann brothers and they did the same afterwards.

The markets you think of are as possible as working communism.

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

#190
post #52
post #38

It is interesting to see how much of the replication is done by the Chinese and how little is done by the Western countries. Is this the difference between the making-stuff-happen attitude and the sclerotic attitude?

Someone on Twitter spoke on this, so I cant' confirm its accuracy. They said that the reagents for this are usually made in China. As soon as this paper was published, labs in China bought out the reserves and they became hard to source in the West.

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