Is it the idea that there might be something great happening, and that we might get the chance to live in exciting times? I could see people wanting to believe in that opportunity.

Pride isn’t a good look or smell.

Try humility instead. You may not like to eat humble pie, but others love to watch that.

Also, perhaps some introspection would give nuance to why being wrong bothers you so much.

This is also a great opportunity to demonstrate your understanding on how difficult the scientific process is to your friends.

Telling your friends you have changed your mind on everything you told them earlier because of new evidence should be something you take pride in. Because only true scientists change their minds, and even discard their most cherished theories, based on new evidence.

Y'know those stories on Reddit about people's awful childhoods, like "I needed the toilet in a shop and my parents told me to be quiet, and then when I pissed myself, my dad dragged me outside and beat me for 'embarrassing him'"?

I told my dad LK-99 isn't a superconductor and he said "that's a shame, oh well, exciting while it lasted".

There is a lesson there: do not make definitive statements about something that is uncertain. There are a lot of interesting things to say about this material along the lines of “it would be cool if it worked, then we could do x or y” while still making clear that this is tentative.

> The whole time LK-99 was in the news, we were wringing our hands about potential uses and the impact it would have on our world. For once it seemed maybe there was hope that we’d see exciting times again with exponential advances in technology. That dream has now been thoroughly eradicated.

Some people did. The materials scientists I know were mostly skeptical with a hint of cynicism or optimism, depending on the individual.

> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.

It is difficult to say. We barely understand what makes a material a superconductor. This understanding will improve, and we will do some more systematic studies. Or it might show up in some completely unrelated project, just by chance. It is very difficult to say when this might happen. All we can say is that so far we don’t think that room-temperature superconductors are a physical impossibility. So at least there is hope.

Maybe, but I have immensely more respect for someone who can just admit they were wrong compared to someone who bends of backwards to justify their incorrectness.

And that's just LK-99. You could easily be just as mistaken about other things. If you start confusing possibles with absolutes things get messy really quickly.

> By the time a true room temp superconductor comes out, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.

It could happen tomorrow, next week, next year, within the next 500 years or later or even never at all. And that still wouldn't prove that no such thing exists. We just do not know.

If you step back and scan headlines a few days, or weeks, or years, after, you find that almost all of it comes to naught. (Not absolutely all of it, there is some real news, and occasionally a story grips and/or surprises.)

You can spare yourself a tremendous amount of cognitive and emotional strain and whiplash by waiting for the dust to settle. And possibly, cultivating a sense for what might actually be significant. (Early stories of a virus in a city I'd never heard of in China growing at 10x a week caught my attention quickly, as one reasonably recent example.) It's possible to get caught with a normalcy bias, though being prepared to quickly revise your priors helps here.

The LK-99 story reminded me a lot news that broke shortly after I'd first come online via the campus Unix network at uni: the Fleischmann–Pons cold fusion paper. There was a lot of excited discussion, and within a few days I had (courtesy of an FTP server --- this was not only pre-World Wide Web, but pre-Gopher, though we had Usenet) an ASCII-text version of the paper, something I excitedly wrote (via snail mail) home about. And ... after a few weeks ... it turned out to be nothing.

Science, mostly, progresses relatively slowly. Big upsets are rare. Extravagent claims (in a hype-driven and grant-driven world) are increasingly prevalent (it was bad enough 35 years ago, it's worse now).

So this time 'round, I scanned the headlines and some of the discussion, but mostly sat the story out.

The generative-AI story (as another recent example) seems more substantial but still somewhat frothy. Though I strongly do expect that far more capable AI techniques could well emerge quite suddenly and to profound effect.

But when you recognise that a story is largely speculation, especially if it's defending a point of view (Business As Usual / status quo or New World Order / this changes everything, or many views lying betwixt and beyond) recongise many of them as strongly motivated and quite often weakly informed.