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0 pointspjc502y ago0 comments

I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science. How many battery "breakthroughs" have we seen on here? Meanwhile what actually works is incremental improvement in lithium battery manufacturing.

The 1947 Golden Age SF is interesting because the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space. While the transistor succeeded to an extent nobody imagined due to the magic of compounding improvements.

> You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet

Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us that AI will be able to produce videos of anything that are indistinguishable from reality, and that we should all learn never to believe video evidence again.

I'm still very much in the "don't know" camp on the superconductor, but what I do know is that it's not worth getting excited until we know it's real.

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feoren2y ago

> Meanwhile over in the AI "optimism" channel people are telling us ...

I'm not sure why this line of reasoning is so prevalent. Someone says "There's strong evidence for A" and the reply is "yes but someone who is not currently in the conversation also said there was strong evidence for B and that is wrong! Therefore you are silly for believing in A!" What? We're not supposed to be optimistic when we see strong evidence for a breakthrough in a phenomenon we already knew existed, because someone else believes something else!? Because some other person believes in ghosts and psychic powers, no one is allowed to believe anything? These are different people making different claims! It's insanity.

pjc50OP2y ago

My argument was that the _video_ evidence is not strong, because it's poor quality and videos are easy to fake, while also linking this to another piece of techno-optimism which has made it easier to fake videos.

cthalupa2y ago

And that's why you shouldn't particularly believe videos without providence.

However, we have videos being posted by PhDs at universities and their students. The stakes are quite a bit higher if it turns out they were faking these videos - and will be quite readily apparent. This is easy enough to synthesize that there are hundreds of labs in the world working on replicating it. You'd be found out to be a fraud, fast, and for what reason? Twitter likes and retweets for a few weeks? Why would you ruin your career over that?

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shawnz2y ago

> I think we're all horribly burned out by pop-science.

Speak for yourself, I'm happy to lend my positivity to people who think they might be close to breakthroughs even if they are unlikely moonshots, and you better believe I'll be maximally hyping up my own work if I ever feel like I am close to some kind of breakthrough too. That's part of the fun of being a living thing in this weird physical universe.

jacquesm2y ago

Exactly. I find myself a lot more engaged by people working on trying to get room temperature superconductivity checked off than by people figuring out how to do A/B testing on unsuspecting consumers to increase the number of ads that are clicked.

imtringued2y ago

How about an ORM that isn't as bad as Hibernate :(

dlkf2y ago

> the "rocket fanatics" peaked in 1969 and humans haven't gone back to the moon, let alone conquered space

What’s the point of going to the moon? Meanwhile, we have thousands of satellites in space that help predict the weather and facilitate instant long distance communication.

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