That said, in general, 9 out of 10 things that are very promising will ultimately fail, and there's nothing wrong with discussing or following all 10, the 1 will work, and it'll be great.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
It may not be true, but some amount of keeping it light definitely works for me. I mean I love taking myself seriously too. And some amount of doing that I think is necessary. I guess I just don't wanna put all my eggs in one strategic-approach basket, you know? People are complex! :)
Isn't this textbook survivorship bias?
On the grand scale, I bet the skeptics have a much better record than the optimists.
Progress, and working on progress is inherently risky. But by the time actual progress seems to have arrived speculation on how true it is and what the impact will be if it is true is perfectly valid and those that would rather engage in shouting everything down are technically off topic and I personally find it annoying. Not quite as annoying as crank science but still.
On that subject: there is still a non-zero chance this is a hoax but that chance is rapidly diminishing, there is a very large chance that this whole discovery will not be immediately practical and that it will still take a ton of work and funding to unlock its true potential. The skeptic would rather not spend that money and would rather avoid the work, it's a cop-out, and a cheap and easy one at that, and it's exactly why the skeptics have the better track record: progress is hard. But not impossible so let's see what comes out but let's not give up hope that progress is still possible, especially not when it seems that progress is being made.
My initial skepticism was high (this isn't the first room temperature superconductor claim), then as I read the paper and checked some stuff my conclusion was that this could be the real thing but the numbers are such that it isn't a practical superconductor just yet. That confidence has since gone up a bit but I still would not bet that this material as discovered right now has huge industrial applications. But if it is true then I am somewhat optimistic that it opens the door to lots of new research and that research may well pay off (or not, time will tell).
Seriously: if it doesn't interest you, you could simply refrain from commenting and even reading. This stuff is the bleeding edge of tech and if you consider everybody active in these fields or talking about it to be starry eyed children then you should re-calibrate your sense of what these scientific discoveries are likely to cause further downstream. The idea here is to find some balance, it's perfectly ok to discuss a new discovery and to consider the implications on the caveat that it might not pan out. But superconductors already exist, there is no reason in physics why an arbitrary temperature cut-off is going to limit them from existing at room temperature, if you look at the trend since superconductivity was first observed there is a steady increase which with ever smaller margin of error predicts a breakthrough somewhere around 2030. It arrived a bit early, but it - apparently - did arrive, and if true will lead to a revolution in power transmission. And if it isn't true then we'll just drop it and hope for the next round, but I suspect that even if it isn't true there are going to be a lot of labs wondering if they can salvage at least some knowledge gained during all the scrutiny of this particular attempt.
Similar trends can be observed rectro-actively for practical solar panels, micro electronics, powered flight and so on. All had their skeptics, sometimes unreasonable skeptics and all were proven eventually wrong an those inventions transformed our world and are still transforming our world. You see a stupid silly black fleck floating over a magnet and wonder what the big deal is. I see a glimpse of an alternative future that has a lot of potential implications for how we live.