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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

#191

Post by fallingknife »

jacquesm wrote: post #65
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…

That's not all that different from how the financial crisis came to be: derivatives on top of bad loans. Here it is bad bets on top of a possible phenomenon that probably none of the participants in the bets have any insight in.

The bets were never the issue. The leverage in the banking system was. The bad bets were just the spark that lit it. The prediction markets are not leveraged

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

#192

Post by ChemSpider »

I am surprised that anyone still thinks this thing is legit. I mean, I wish it was true, but the publication, the approach and the infights in the team do not instill confidence.

To me, it seems they can not recreate the "effect" themselves. Otherwise they would be shipping their samples around the world by now.

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

#193

Post by tinco »

nonethewiser wrote: post #154
tinco wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pred…

So practically speaking, what can you do with the fact that X% of fans (because people betting are enthusiasts) think LK-99 will reproduce and Y% think it wont?

You assume all the people betting are enthusiasts. The theory of prediction markets is that rational actors in the market will recognise that a portion of the betters is overhyped and adjust their bets to make use of their irrational behaviour.

If the rational actors are actually effective at making such adjustments I don't know, I bet there's statistics out there on how well prediction markets correlate with reality.

In any case, even if the market was perfect, it wouldn't tell us if LK-99 would reproduce, which I guess is the meat of your question. It would just tell us how likely it is that an experimental result made under those specific circumstances would reproduce. And what you could do with that information depends on what your answer to the question: "How would I be affected if LK-99 would reproduce?" would be.

If you're a big energy business leader, and you want to filter what topics to spend your valuable time on maybe you could set a rule that you only want spend time reading scientific papers that have >10% odds of being legit.

More realistically though, I think things like prediction markets are mostly useful to traders who are trying to arbitrage things like resource markets. What's the price of copper going to do when this turns out to be true? You could adjust your futures based on that.

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

#194

Post by WaffleIronMaker »

7moritz7 wrote: post #116
WaffleIronMaker wrote: post #10

Note that the original table has been more recently updated: https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

So what is the wordpress post for?

The author apparently did not intend widespread readership:

> Whoever is out there, please stop clicking my link. I used to get 10 views a day from Vtuber wannabes and it's now a weekday. I don't even consider it a good enough summary! I thought the 60 views yesterday on the post was good, and now it's a hundred times that! What. Is. Happening.

> Seriously, this is weird. I already got two pingbacks from suspicious sites stealing my post. Joke's on them though, I'm constantly editing it when I have time.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/claims-of-room-tempe...

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

#195

Post by RedCondor »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #166
RedCondor wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 classica…

I see. So this is about “the right” to take a vacation? What are you talking about and what am I? we seem to live in different realities. I can’t even imagine somehow I would have a government “right” to take a vacation. Who is paying for it? I don’t get it.

All so-called "capital returns" are in reality produced by working people, and therefore people get to democratically decide what they do with them, through whatever decision-making forms they politically choose and consent to organize themselves under.

Insofar as there are disagreements, because capitalist "geniuses" don't think their riches should be subject to democracy, we have a struggle between socialism and capitalism.

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

#196

Post by tomrod »

rcme wrote: post #169
ot wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Usually copying someone else’s work without permission is considered (intellectual property) theft. Also, this person just copied the initial work but isn’t as committed to keeping things up to date. Much better to use the original source.

Except in the case of citation.

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

#197

Post by amelius »

twoodfin wrote: post #178
amelius wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counterargument. Prediction markets could also be used to hedge. E.g. if you invest in technology around LK-99, and then use prediction market to prevent going bankrupt in case you were wrong. THUS: it doesn't mean that prediction markets give good predictions. By the way. Do you have some data on that? I.e., statistics of prediction markets being right vs wrong?

The hedge is still a signal of the degree of risk you ascribe to the possibility your technology won’t work.

If I invest in technology (hoping it will work) but use the prediction market to hedge in case the technology won't work, how does that tell anyone watching the prediction market that people have net positive feelings about the technology?

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

#198

Post by tinco »

seppel wrote: post #110
tinco wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not to take away from your point, but there is a better way than prediction markets, and that's careful objective research by non-experts ( https://goodjudgment.com/ ). It's been shown that teams of such researchers consistently beat prediction markets on these sorts of topics. Anecdotal evidence suggests it might be that the presence of experts and cultural preconceptions corrupt prediction markets enough to diverge…

> It's been shown that teams of such researchers consistently beat prediction markets on these sorts of topics. This sounds like free money.

Running prediction markets is probably more free money than that. Building and maintaining research teams like that is not easy or cheap, if it would be then Good Judgment Inc. would be rolling in cash.

Edit for context: Good Judgement Inc. is a sort of consultancy firm formed based on the results of an experiment called "The good judgment project" where psychologists challenged a community to predict (geopolitical) events. By structuring it as a team based tournament they figured out a list of qualities/rules that would make an individual or theme very good at accurately predicting events. The teams that followed these rules outperformed prediction markets. Following the rules is basically a full time commitment.

The list is here, go get your free money: https://goodjudgment.com/philip-tetlocks-10-commandments-of-...

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

#199

Post by wg0 »

ChemSpider wrote: post #192

I am surprised that anyone still thinks this thing is legit. I mean, I wish it was true, but the publication, the approach and the infights in the team do not instill confidence. To me, it seems they can not recreate the "effect" themselves. Otherwise they would be shipping their samples around the world by now.

Don't really get this extreme sensitivity to downvote. I mean - it seems what it seems. May be it seems really promising and trustworthy to some, good for them.

That apart - it seems low hanging fruits in the nature are almost over. Scientific progress might not be as rapid and consistent as in past in coming decades especially when world seems to be heading towards multiple (avoidable) conflicts.

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

#200

Post by sudosysgen »

fallingknife wrote: post #191
jacquesm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not all that different from how the financial crisis came to be: derivatives on top of bad loans. Here it is bad bets on top of a possible phenomenon that probably none of the participants in the bets have any insight in.

The bets were never the issue. The leverage in the banking system was. The bad bets were just the spark that lit it. The prediction markets are not leveraged

No reason why they wouldn't become leveraged.
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