NB: there's a lesson here that holds for nearly all of "news". Much of it is either early (partial, erroneous, speculative) accounts of something that's just occurred, speculation about something that might occur, or blather about an event that's scheduled and programmed and has little opportunity for real surprise (though of course that slim chance is played for all it's worth).
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.
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.