Young researchers in China often face intense competition and pressure. While they are generally well-funded in the short-term, even more so than their counterparts in the US or Europe, the lack of long-term career security can be challenging. They must continuously chase after every potential scientific breakthrough, like LK-99, not just out of passion or curiosity, but as a necessary step for survival in their career.
Furthermore, the system in China offers many awards, grants, and titles that are tied to age. These are not just for prestige but are critical for progressing in their career. This situation adds another layer of urgency and competition among young researchers.
> Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
some possibilities:
- they have not been able to conclusively replicate anything and don't want to publish a negative result for fear of someone else publishing a conclusive positive result later.
- they are more careful to publish something that they are not (yet?) 100% sure about
- they don't care so much about the whole 'science in the spotlight' thing and prefer to go the traditional route of publishing after peer review of one or more papers rather than to make YT videos and having to fend off a barrage of interaction
Yes, good points though the money angle is debatable.
The USA and Europe are 'on average' also more pro-science than the rest of the world, but I think the East has the edge in education and comes across as more focused on progress. Probably this is underpinned in part because they have a ton of very hard problems that need solving and in the 'rich West' people are much less driven because their lives and the lives of their families are on average already quite plushy.
It makes you wonder what could happen in Africa and Latin America once they embrace education and science.
I didn’t want to get into it too much but I wrote that Chinese people are on average, more pro-science because they’re less religious or that their religion does not strongly contradict with science.
I’m guessing your parents’ HK church friends are Christians?
Yeah I'm not disagreeing with you at all, it's the Christianity and Hong Kong's post-colonial legacy.
The mainland Chinese social order is secular. The technocratic state, the CCP, had a lot to do with that. I would actually argue that technocracy is a superficial form of scientific culture.
Because all of these replications aren't contributing much; they're bare bones efforts with little to no scientific insight. Not one of these papers is conclusive in terms of showing evidence for it being a superconductor. None of them even contribute meaningfully.
This happens in machine learning all the time. Low quality papers rush in after every major release and announcement in order to be first. But in the long term they're meaningless because it takes time to do a good job.
Good labs don't want to announce half done maybe results. They want to announce conclusive comprehensive high quality results they can stand behind. That's what moves science forward.
Plenty of labs are working on lk-99, but they won't publish this sort of half assed analysis.
These studies help enthuse people though. I welcome them. Not for science but potential. Tells me that something is there, rest is on experts as you said.
A lot of commenters here are from the West, and the atmosphere between the PRC and the West (particularly the US) at the moment is quite a bit more acrimonious and competitive than it has been historically. It makes sense that people would leap first to essentially "They aren't as smart as us"/"They're less honest than us"/"They're less trustworthy than us" etc. The simplest and most likely correct explanation is that the PRC has a lot more STEM students in absolute terms and even proportionately, more and very well funded labs with very ambitious leadership and "national spirit"/"something to prove" style thinking, and that particularly in chemistry/materials science the PRC is dominant, with a huge proportion of all the highest quality chemistry focused universities, academies etc.
I, too, found it fascinating how every initial reply dodged giving the Chinese credit. Instead, all of them tried every way to paint their publications in a negative light.
Surely, most tech workers have encountered working with highly competent technical coworkers from China? Or that Chinese students in America tend to perform well above average academically?
Why should anyone be surprised that China performs exceedingly well in sciences?
But they have also encountered IP theft and Chinese nationals assaulting local and foreign nationals in countries they are lucky and fortunate to have the right to study in, over protests: https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3019888/h...
Now I hate that I have to say this (because it should be a given), but _obviously_ this does not apply across the board, but when people experience shocking behaviour like this you can see why they might hold grudges or biases, even when that's wrong to do.
That aside, China & the US (of which are are a lot of Americans on this site) seem to have held a grudge for quite a long time now, on both sides. Which is a shame, because we're all human at the end of the day and especially science should recognise that stupid tribal human concepts like nationalities and borders are meaningless to the big picture.
> Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
> the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
On a tangent, this idea of reputation keeps on coming up in this whole discussion and I am burdened by it in a way I don't fully understand. The way people have talked, if this LK-99 doesn't work out, then it is almost as if those who published this did something _morally_ wrong. Well, morally wrong is not quite true, but the way people talk about it tanking their reputation it feels like such a strong statement. Is there some way we can focus on the science and not get bogged down in the very human reputational part of this whole thing? It's almost as if a good chunk of the scientific community don't care about the benefits the science brings but the reputational benefits.
A scientist's career depends on their reputation. For them to have the best opportunities, they need everyone to have the highest respect for the quality of their work. If they damage their reputation, it could ruin everything they've spent decades working toward.
Of course they care about science itself, but there's a limit to what risks they'll be willing to take when it affects them personally.
For people with a relatively low reputation (or no reputation, i.e. unknown), taking a risk is not a bad move. They have less opportunity, and there's a chance the risk might pay off and boost their reputation.
For people whose reputation is already good, the risk is less worth it. They don't stand to gain as much, and they could lose a lot. So they're less likely to do it.
It's a direct side effect of reputation and funding being closely correlated: if your reputation is that you put out stuff that doesn't work you won't get funded. This is dumb, but that's how the world works. That's why you almost always see the 'more research is needed' line in various papers, it is most helpful when seeking for funding that one paper will lead to another. But (unfortunately) negative results aren't nearly as often published, and that is because they will not get cited as much in follow on papers. It's all the result of metrics based meta analysis of papers, aka the 'impact factor' (which, no kidding is a copyrighted term), once that got established that became the thing that science partially optimized for.
During the 'golden age' of science, the time of the Royal Society the fields weren't specialized at all and the publication mechanism was scientists sending each other interesting stuff by post. At that time there was no meta analysis at all and there was so much low hanging fruit that the 'gentleman scientist' could make big breakthroughs in their home laboratories. But as that low hanging fruit decreased the educational paths required before being able to do meaningful science became longer and longer, then specialization set in and the costs of doing science went up. That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.
> That's how we arrived at grants used to fund science.
A lot of these gentleman scientists were independently wealthy aristocrats that didn't need hand-outs. The fact that we don't to a meaningful extent have that sort of leisure class anymore is arguably a much bigger reason we need grant funded science these days.
It could be argued there a bit of a replication of the pattern in the space race between Musk and Bezos, but they're missing the sort of well education the aristocrats of yore would have had[1]. They employ a lot of people to do the actual dirty work, but that's not really a big difference from back then either.
> It's a direct side effect of reputation and funding being closely correlated
This sheds some light on it to me. I guess what partly surprises me is that people seem to care more about reputation than just a means for improving the signal to noise ratio in papers or as a estimate on what will give you your biggest bang for your buck.
The other issue I see come up is the idea that if there is no signal to noise filter, then a scientist might "waste their time," either reading the paper or trying to replicate. But to me, it sounds a little bit like trying to avoid actually doing science. And peer reviewed papers don't imply excellent quality either. You should evaluate papers on their merits. It is your job, as a scientist, to evaluate the most productive approaches based on the merits of the science being done, not based on reputation.
Working in science is different from working in other fields in that you work with things that are not well known, where a lot is unclear and your job is to move information out of this murky regime out into the light.
This means it's really easy to just claim something, that will be really hard for others to verify.
And wrong claims are incredibly common. It's easy to delude yourself through all sorts of biases or good old sloppy work.
That's why, when scientists talk to each other, they need to know that the other person is a serious scientist and won't pollute their mind with nonsense.
If you develop a reputation for making baseless claims, people will stop including your claims in their own thoughts.
This is an good point. I think there is a difficult balance to strike between open communication and adding confusing noise to the scientific literature. Partly for historical reasons, there is an expectation that published science is correct to the best knowledge of the authors. Since writing, publishing, and reading papers takes a lot of time and effort, there are advantages to this precedent. I work in physics, and I can tell you that if we published all of our half-baked and often wrong ideas, we would waste a lot of people's time, at worst sending people down blind allies that we would soon rule our ourselves. I suppose tying reputation damage to publishing incorrect or misleading results is then part of the incentive structure that keeps publication quality high. At the extreme, there's was one recent LK-99 paper that had an obvious glitch in their data, and instead of taking a bit more time to debug it, they just posted the paper and speculated about what was going on. If that's how much you're rushing, how do I know I can trust your data?
But there are costs to this. There are big gaps between what people discuss with colleagues and what gets published, and the is no forum to publish partial or negative results, except maybe conferences. Ideally published papers stay at a very high bar, but there are other forums to publicly share work in progress. In a way Twitter is becoming this.
>Good rigorous science takes time to produce. It can take anywhere between several months to a year or more, and the career implications for rushing something out that is later found lacking is not great.
By my count, 18/20 top universities for chemistry research is in China. The first US university in chemistry is MIT at 23.
One of the attempts is by USTC, the second best university in the world for chemistry research according to the Nature link.
China's lead in chemistry research is also translating directly to real world applications. For example, CATL and BYD combined own more than 50% of the car battery market. Six of the top 10 car battery makers are Chinese companies. [0]
It's not surprising that most of the first replication attempts are from China.
I think for a lot of people this whole saga is probably the first time that they realize that a ton of original work is done in Asia, rather than that it is just our manufacturing hub. They have to adjust their mental model to account for a view of Asia that is in important ways outstripping the West in terms of resources and combined brain power. The amount of scientific output in Asia is astounding, and the number of active scientists dwarfs the numbers in the West. If they would switch to stop publishing in English it would be quite amusing.
Lmao, all that implied was that rushed papers don't have time for in depth analysis, only reproducing the material without further insight. Which is absolutely true; we're not super-human, it takes time to replicate the material and then time to disseminate why/how it works.
You inferred logic that was never present in my reply. It's a correlation/causation error. As it is fully possible for things to happen in China that are not caused by the specific character and nature of Chinese people; pointing out that something has happened in China is not an implication that it's caused some the special nature of Chinese people or Chinese society.
If you go out of your way to look for uncharitable ways of interpreting what others are saying, you will find them.
Instead of going on the offensive and taking such an uncharitable interpretation as a given, if you truly can find no charitable interpretation[1], maybe ask for a clarification rather than jumping to conclusions about unspoken implications.
While it's true that good science often takes time, I believe it's not necessarily the whole picture. In fast-paced and rapidly evolving fields like this one, swift and open sharing of progress can be incredibly valuable. This is evident from the recent developments in AI and large language models (LLMs), where real-time collaboration and data sharing have led to exponential advancements.
I guess it's a mix of
- It's a good opportunity to gain visibility by working something grabbing the news. 1st room temperature superconductor, that's big
- (Under)graduate lab interns can be thrown onto any crash projects at will without much repercussion or resistance, boss is boss and should not be subject to questioning
I did a post-doc in China, so that's my sample size N=1 piece of cheap opinion
I imagine over the next few weeks there'll be an explosion of efforts to replicate if it's truly that straightforward to produce for reasonably-equipped labs.
> Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?
Red phosphorus, one of the ingredients in the synthesis, is a controlled substance in the US. Might be delaying everyone while they fill out the paperwork with whoever their supplier is.
Two from HUST: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14p4y1V7kS/ https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV13k4y1G7i1/
One by USTC https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1Ex4y1X7ix/ this tiny sample can stand on its pointy side.
One by Qufu Normal University https://www.zhihu.com/zvideo/1669820225079070720
One with THU background but claims a personal project https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV14z4y1s7Vo
Why are't more labs outside China making LK-99 and publish videos?