> Hyun-Tak Kim is unlikely to ruin his career and legacy for something careless and frivolous.
you came with presumption that this man knows & understands the subject matter. that is a very bold assumption given the mounting evidence against such brief.
> so lets assign a 10% probability
why 10%? not 0.01%? because of his "prof." title or previous publications? Surely that won't change the course of nature I thought?
> and then from reputed Western researchers/labs.
what makes you discount inputs from Russian, Chinese, Japanese researchers?
You seem to have some really wired brief here, get some help I say.
> you came with presumption that this man knows & understands the subject matter. that is a very bold assumption given the mounting evidence against such brief.
Not OP but "this man" has published enough papers on superconductors[0] that yes, he absolutely deserves the benefit of the doubt.
making a few PDFs publicly available doesn't change the course of nature. he is now in the position to fully explain to the world what is going on here as no one seem to be able to reproduce what he claims.
given such facts, it is totally reasonable to question his expertise on the concern subject. you are free to judge people purely based on how much they publish, I totally respect that.
- Nothing against Russian researchers, but apart from Iris who is somewhat anonymous and doesnt have the required equipment to create good samples, I havent seen anyone from there interested in performing expts on this
- There have already been some retractions from China after the initial replication claims. I get the feeling they have been overeager about this to prove themselves. Maybe if they approach this with cooler heads, they could be depended on more.
- When i said western labs, i spiritually include japan, taiwan, south korean labs in that, since they generally have similar practices and rigor (even if geographically they are in the east)
Lets not drag Japan into this. They have very high standards in research despite the few examples you gave here, some of which are not even science related.
As a widely accepted measure of this, you can read about the many nobel laureates from japan.
Anyways lets keep politics out of the discussion. It was not my intent anyway, in case you perceived it that way.
> When i said western labs, i spiritually include japan, taiwan, south korean labs in that, since they generally have similar practices and rigor (even if geographically they are in the east)
It's difficult to communicate with you if you just redefine common expressions however you see fit. It's like saying "by left, I mean right." Just... stop.
I've seen this on here before. Guys convincing themselves that they're being rational and you're being emotional - because they put little numbers besides their feelings and perform some calculations to produce a percentage that "proves" their theory about Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible.
Anyone who thinks rationality and emotion are mutually exclusive, hasn't understood half of what any of the big names in that area wrote.
Which isn't to say you or the other replies next to mine are wrong — any memes that get shared also get misunderstood, including attempts to be… less wrong.
(Putting numbers on my uncertainty has mainly made me aware that I'm bad at it, which is useful to be aware of even if it doesn't make me better at it).
>their theory about Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible.
Your politics are revealed with your choice of examples here.
Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed.
My beliefs and my politics are pretty transparent in my comment history, I'm not trying to avoid them being "revealed" whatsoever.
> Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed
Not me? I saw people applying the methods we're talking about to convince themselves that the likelihood of their pet conspiracy theory is true is around the same as a coin toss. You can reach bone-headed conclusions if you're determined to do so, whether you use some decision-making mental model or not.
That's a false binary. "I don't have enough information to form an opinion here" and "I feel like that guy's probably full of shit, though" are in no way mutually exclusive.
I agree with the main claim you are making here. That decision-making models are important an aspect to minimizing the chance of failure when considering decisions. Nothing I said is an attempt to contradict your main claim.
> Your politics are revealed with your choice of examples here [Antivax stuff, Putin/Ukraine or whatever is credible].
I understand that antivax has been claimed by the mainstream right (there are antivaxers on the far-left but they have limited influence), but it feels like I'm living in some bizarro world that people see the efficacy of vaccination as being "political." It feels like I'm living a ham-handed allegorical story about dangers of irrationalism.
> Who needs a decision-making mental model when we can just trust what the experts tell us about these things, or maybe "trust your gut"? That's never failed.
I'd argue that trusting your gut or trusting experts are both decision-making models. They both work well within the right context and fail outside those contexts.
* Trusting your gut is often the right option when you have to make an immediate decision and you don't have time to weight the various options. Something weird is happening on the highway ahead of me should I break now? I have 0.3 seconds to decide.
* Trusting the experts works if the experts are experts in that field and that experts in that field have a long track record of correct predictions and the experts are talking to are in fact experts in that field and have access to the level data which has rendered correct predictions in the data. I'd assign a near 100% probability to a statement by an astronomer that tomorrow night will be a full moon over Toronto, I'd be less likely to assign a high probability to a physicist saying that this new experiment they have will detect sterile neutrinos.
Even those fields in which I am an expert in, I weigh the claims of other subject matter experts when I do not have the time to do the necessary reading and work. The biggest problem with trusting experts is determining is a particular "expert" is actually an expert in that field when you are non-expert in that field.
No, let's not. I have seen examples here on HN where leading experts in the relevant field have been accused of Dunning-Kruger (I recognized the usernames, the accusers obviously did not). Such accusations are just namecalling and destroy any civilized debate.
you came with presumption that this man knows & understands the subject matter. that is a very bold assumption given the mounting evidence against such brief.
> so lets assign a 10% probability
why 10%? not 0.01%? because of his "prof." title or previous publications? Surely that won't change the course of nature I thought?
> and then from reputed Western researchers/labs.
what makes you discount inputs from Russian, Chinese, Japanese researchers?
You seem to have some really wired brief here, get some help I say.