I did not say I consider private research in some sort of higher level than public research. I only said they have no incentive to do full disclosure right now. Without knowing exactly what they know, it is insulting to authors to describe, or even hint, them as avoiding to accept failture. It is simply unwarranted ad-hominem and not contributing anything to academic discussion at this point.
When the authors/executives of a private research company are making fraudulent affiliation claims to established corporations and research universities it's actually very warranted to be dismissive of their claims in the absence of supportive evidence. Especially when there is growing evidence suggestive of failure.
This is not the behavior of ethical scientists and suggests malice.
Faking affiliation and refusing to provide supportive evidence both smell like a fundraising scam (i.e. running out of money and need to raise more to continue research seems like the simplest explanation for this behavior).
Without getting into a philosophical discussion of whether ad hominem is ever appropriate.
This is, in fact, the opposite of ad hominem.
Ad hominem would suggest we are attacking the claim based solely on the author's credibility. In fact, multiple independent replication experiments failed and theoretical models suggest it doesn't work.
So instead of attacking the authors the question is should we be trusting them at their word, and the answer which is reasonably based on credibility seems to be no.
The science behind the claims is being scientifically discussed and the preponderance of available evidence provide no experimental or theoretical support.
We're separately discussing the author's credibility as the claims cannot be verified by anyone but the authors. One example of a time we do this is the "disclosures" section of any academic publication.
Are you arguing someone with a conflict of interest and history of making fraudulent arguments should not be placed under heightened scrutiny?
Combining both available evidence and author credibility is completely valid and leads one to the conclusion that this is incorrect until proven otherwise. It's not like we're solely dismissing the claim because the authors have poor credibility.
Preponderance of available evidence is irrelevant to assessing scientific claims of fact.
The original claims only need to be rigorously verified once. As it currently stands the original claims are claimed to have been partially replicated. What's needed now is the rigor.
> Preponderance of available evidence is irrelevant to assessing scientific claims of fact.
The issue is that trying to prove a negative is very hard in this case.
It is similar to me saying that there is a type of cat that floats, although most don't. It is very hard to prove me wrong because even if you find 1M cats that do not float, it doesn't mean that there is a type of cat you missed to find.
All we can say is that we tried to find cats in a thorough way and none of them float.
When that happens, it is often standard to turn the argument over to the one that is claiming that cats float -- prove that you have a cat that floats, rather than relying on me to prove that no cats float.
This is why people are saying we need to do an analysis of the SC sample from LK. If it is super hard to produce, but we can confirm that they made one, then it is true. Otherwise, it is probably best to assume that the claim isn't true.
No one in this thread is saying the Korean researchers have a superconductor in their possession has been proven false.
We have an unverified claim of a significant discovery released in a pre-print that was taken on good-faith and replication experiments were attempted.
This has resulted in what can be described as a very thorough and publicized review process by multiple researchers qualified to serve as reviewers. As this was all done in good faith it is effectively analogous to the scientific standard of blinded peer review as no one was considering the author's credibility.
The conclusion of multiple reviews has been the equivalent of "recommend rejection, invitation to resubmit with major revisions". Major revisions being verification of superconductivity in the sample they possess and further details regarding synthesis and yield as what has been described is clearly not working as claimed.
The relevance of author credibility is for a confidence estimation that a superconductor has been discovered at this time. Obviously, if this was Argonne or [peer] one would be more confident than in a private research corporation with a history of claiming false affiliations to notable research institutions. This is not an ad hominem attack, it's a credibility assessment.
The current state is we have a flawed and effectively rejected manuscript making a significant claim. Looking at the authors credibility is an attempt to remain optimistic but this also points to low confidence.
