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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

#201

Post by gilleain »

tinco wrote: post #83
throw0101a wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pred…

Have you heard the one about the Emperor of China's nose?

https://imaginatorium.org/stuff/nose.htm

Basically, making an average of a large number of estimates of an unknown value will (of course) fail if most/none of the estimators have any idea of the actual value being estimated.

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

#202

Post by bhaak »

Corrado wrote: post #155
pushkine wrote: post #145

I've only seen one picture of an alleged successful replication yet: https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856

Since Twitter is no longer allowing public access to posts, it would be better to not link to it. Or better yet, re-post the tweet somewhere else and link to that.

They backpedaled on that and restricted it to single tweets.

So if not logged in you can see a single tweet now but no longer threads.

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

#203

Post by ethbr0 »

fallingknife wrote: post #185
rcxdude wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Random allocation.

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

#204

Post by kybernetikos »

alchemist1e9 wrote: post #103
mellosouls wrote: post #97

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”?

I would describe myself as cautiously pro market, but I think it's hard to deny that they are effective externality seeking machines. If there is any way of providing a benefit while finding a way to impose the cost diffusely, you can bet that the market will find it. Market based systems guarantee that costs will be hidden and imposed on those who don't receive the benefit to the maximum extent possible given physics and law.

On top of that, it's interesting that we only use the market concept at the meta level. Vanishingly few of the businesses that compete in the marketplace are internally arranged on market principles. Instead they follow bureaucratic and oligarchic principles internally. And when the survival of the state is on the line because of war, we don't trust markets to allocate resources to get important things built quickly - rather the state takes power to directly cause some things to be built and other things not to be.

Although the market gets praised for being good at allocation of capital, I would say it's good in the way evolution is good at finding things that can survive. It might find great solutions that a planned process wouldn't, but it'll take a long time and a lot of things will die in the process.

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

#205

Post by alchemist1e9 »

morelisp wrote: post #172
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markets don’t ignore it, they learn from it. They don’t need you or any authority to protect them. Edit: Understand that the scammer has to buy, then release the false information, and then sell. They only “scam” the buyers that don’t critically assess this new information, such as it’s provenance and quality. This means that over time only the best analysts survive and thrive. Smart speculators likely sold the spike…

> They only “scam” the buyers that don’t critically assess this new information Yes correct that is a scam, no scare quotes. A scam doesn't become less of scam because it worked or didn't work.

So you feel governments should babysit prediction market speculators who can’t evaluate information for themselves? Or wait that’s too hard, so let’s just ban them, well because … fairness obviously.

The issues are not problems as people make them out to be, you don’t have an intrinsic right to not be scammed, or to take vacations, as nice as it sounds, those are just fantasy that leads to worse situations when attempting to make reality.

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

#206

Post by sudosysgen »

oneshtein wrote: post #146
jacquesm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Sure, but that's fine and expected since you don't need a sufficient fusion density for net energy.

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

#207

Post by alchemist1e9 »

dist-epoch wrote: post #165
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The reason regulation is introduced in every trading market is because scammers are killing the market. How long do you think an honest operator can survive in a market where 90% of participants are scammers? You talk about skilled participants. The way to have 100% skill is to manufacture an event. The history of financial markets is rich in examples. Or more recently, the endless supply of scamming in sports bettin…

I understand that is the common perception and an understandable one based on how the information on this topic is presented to the public. However it’s likely not true, unregulated markets have boomed and provide many valuable services and information. I’ve personally heard an argument promoting even removal of insider trading laws and that markets would actually be fairer and more efficient without them.

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

#208

Post by ethbr0 »

gilleain wrote: post #201
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…

Have you heard the one about the Emperor of China's nose? https://imaginatorium.org/stuff/nose.htm Basically, making an average of a large number of estimates of an unknown value will (of course) fail if most/none of the estimators have any idea of the actual value being estimated.

> most/none of the estimators have any idea of the actual value being estimated.

A subtle distinction is who is allowed to participate in a prediction market.

"Everyone with $1" is a terrible answer, and produces the bad results people are pointing to.

Financial markets avoid this because of their scale, where there's enough smart money to (usually) punish stupid money.

Absent that scale, it's just stupid money muddling the decisions of smart money.

Prediction markets with a knowledge barrier to entry would produce better results.

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

#209

Post by JonChesterfield »

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…

> buy options on the outcome once they confirm their findings in order to cash out

What stops that being textbook insider trading?

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

#210

Post by fanick »

asimpletune wrote: post #177

So, Russian anime cat girl seems to have cooked a sample and demonstrated some of the claimed properties, although she's explicit that it shouldn't be considered a "replication". https://twitter.com/iris_IGB/status/1685731177523449856

nitter link https://nitter.net/iris_IGB/status/1685268812663271424#m
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