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The current top-level comments are infuriating. You demand that scientists be honest, then accuse them of all-out fraud when they admit they have questions, sec

The current top-level comments are infuriating. You demand that scientists be honest, then accuse them of all-out fraud when they admit they have questions, secure in your ignorance of the things they actually have figured out and tried to tell you over and over again. You are more concerned with feeling smart and skeptical than actually learning. You are the reason we can't have nice things.

exmadscientist 6y ago
For some reason, dark matter brings out the crazies. It was true when I worked in physics, and it's still true now. People need to understand that physicists do NOT consider dark matter to be settled, in any sense! The experiments are not done to polish up any theory... they're done because all of the theories are awful, and guidance from observations is necessary for further progress. I also still fully stand by my previous comment on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666620
- dnautics 6y ago
  > physicists do NOT consider dark matter to be settled, in any sense Almost every honest physicist will say that. But not all physicists are honest, and I don't trust that there is a positive correlation between honest scientists and loudness in the scientific community, especially where it interfaces with the general public. And if you want an explanation of why dark matter brings out the crazies, I think that's as good a reason as any.
  - SubiculumCode 6y ago
    Oh bullshit. Know nothing's of the intricacies of the field love to pretend that the experts are dishonest or idiots. It is so tiring. I'm a neuroscientist, I know nothing of this field, so I keep my damn mouth shut about it. People who've read a few pop physics books should also shut their damn mouths.
    - dnautics 6y ago
      nobody's saying they're idiots. But it's not like the structure of how contemporary scientific discovery gets done isn't ridden with questionable processes that should make you doubt that the system is aligned with producing good science. There is nothing fundamentally different about how physics gets funded (TLAs like NSF, NIH giving out grants via committee), and how physics professors get promoted (H-factors and hiring committees, playing politics at conferences, choosing strategically to work for certain PIs, the truly smart grad students and postdocs burning out and quitting). Most of my peers from high school went into high energy physics (one works at JLab, another is a professor at an east coast college; the others quit or went into... other fields, like finance). Although I am no longer a practicing biochemist, when we got together we complained about the exact same things. So yeah, I don't know about the intricacies of what happens in physics. But that doesn't mean I don't have real insight about what's going on.
      - anoncareer0212 6y ago
        sir this is a thread about Hubble data
        dylan604 6y ago
        Whoa, there big fella! You've wandered away from the pack a little. Let's get you back with the herd before a wolf comes a-callin' Giddyup
    - andrewflnr 6y ago
      I believe GP is trying to say that the people you hear the most from are not necessarily the real experts. The phenomenon of experts being silent while idiots make noise is damn near a human universal, so it's a hypothesis worth taking seriously regardless of the field. The problem is when people use that as an excuse to loudly substitute their own nonsense rather than try to find the actual experts.
      - inopinatus 6y ago
- andrewflnr 6y ago
  I suspect the fact that you can't observe dark matter directly, but physicists all seem to promote it, enables a combination of (at least superficially) reasonable empirical skepticism and conspiracy-minded contrarianism to work together. You have to expend a little bit of actual effort to see through the logic, and if you have any inclination to believe Big Physics is lying to you, then it's easy to just not bother. People forget that the universe does not owe us comprehensibility. Contrary to your linked comment, to this non-physicist, nearly all physicists in public seem to say that, while the details are unknown, dark matter is pretty much definitely a thing. AFAICT they're not wrong about there being multiple lines of evidence for it. But if you mean "no one worth listening to" says even that much, then I don't know any physicists worth listening to.
  - ashildr 6y ago
    > but physicists all seem to promote it It does not seem like it to me (non physicist with some physicist friends from other fields who try to dumb down stuff to me). In my world (SE) it seems like a proprietary binary that must be included for the rest of an open source product describing the observable universe to work very well. Everyone seems to hate it, but nobody wrote something better, yet. Every competing implementation fails to work in other areas that we already are using in production, extensively. And when some professional, who read and understood the source code, starts talking about it, a lot of people voice stupid ideas that they would not have if they passed some lectures on the subject. Edit to add: I envy physicists a little - the best thing for “them” to happen seems to be if something does not work in a very peculiar way.
    - andrewflnr 6y ago
      Ok, but do any of them take seriously the idea that it doesn't exist at all? It was my impression that even theories that try to modify gravity in ways that also explain stuff like the CMB spectrum sort of end up inventing dark matter anyway (IIRC TeVeS was the big one like that).
- coronadisaster 6y ago
  maybe they just need to believe that dark matter is god's poop?
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't do this here.
seventytwo 6y ago
The attitude you’re describing is an epidemic right now. Maybe it’s always been like this, and it’s just a part of human nature, but it seems more prevalent than ever.
bsder 6y ago
> You demand that scientists be honest, then accuse them of all-out fraud when they admit they have questions, secure in your ignorance of the things they actually have figured out and tried to tell you over and over again. Because everybody thinks they can "intuit" their way to knowledge. No. No you can't. We KNOW you can't. We have experiments and statistics and double-blind trials for exactly this reason. "Intuition" only works when coupled with huge amounts of knowledge and effort. Part of the problem is that too many people never suffer the consequences of "truth" in modern society. Consequently, far too many people get the idea that "truth" is negotiable. But, this is not new: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Issac Asimov
inopinatus 6y ago
If you've been raised on a intellectual diet of breakfast television, lip-service superstition, patriotic exceptionalism, and checkbox pedagogy, then you may not inwardly digest that knowledge progresses by incrementally pushing back the boundaries of ignorance, or its key corollary, that leading-edge discovery is driven by people with the most nuanced understanding of their own ignorance. The existential confrontation of research processes and discourse is such anathema to a prevailing mindset of certainty and explanation that a psychosis may develop. So bring your kids up to be comfortable with doubt, to inoculate them against becoming conspiracy nuts.
hindsightbias 6y ago
For every one of those here, there are 1,000X more out there like them. We’ve managed through this before, but social media has made anti-intellectualism the dominant strain of public expression. It is only natural for public leaders to follow. It’s where the action is. It was nearly a millenia between the sacking of Rome and the Renaissance. Intellectuals seem to have the idea that we can’t have that type of reset again. As populations options narrow with climate change and vaunted scientists fail to provide solutions, those populations will turn elsewhere.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  All my life the public has had an anti-intellectual bend to it. Which is fine, disagreement and conflict has it's place. People come with their preferred worldview. The issue is when luddites try to break printing presses, burn down labs and ignore true results when they appear.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

exmadscientist 6y ago

For some reason, dark matter brings out the crazies. It was true when I worked in physics, and it's still true now. People need to understand that physicists do NOT consider dark matter to be settled, in any sense! The experiments are not done to polish up any theory... they're done because all of the theories are awful, and guidance from observations is necessary for further progress. I also still fully stand by my previous comment on this subject: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666620 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23666620

dnautics 6y ago
> physicists do NOT consider dark matter to be settled, in any sense Almost every honest physicist will say that. But not all physicists are honest, and I don't trust that there is a positive correlation between honest scientists and loudness in the scientific community, especially where it interfaces with the general public. And if you want an explanation of why dark matter brings out the crazies, I think that's as good a reason as any.
- SubiculumCode 6y ago
  Oh bullshit. Know nothing's of the intricacies of the field love to pretend that the experts are dishonest or idiots. It is so tiring. I'm a neuroscientist, I know nothing of this field, so I keep my damn mouth shut about it. People who've read a few pop physics books should also shut their damn mouths.
  - dnautics 6y ago
    nobody's saying they're idiots. But it's not like the structure of how contemporary scientific discovery gets done isn't ridden with questionable processes that should make you doubt that the system is aligned with producing good science. There is nothing fundamentally different about how physics gets funded (TLAs like NSF, NIH giving out grants via committee), and how physics professors get promoted (H-factors and hiring committees, playing politics at conferences, choosing strategically to work for certain PIs, the truly smart grad students and postdocs burning out and quitting). Most of my peers from high school went into high energy physics (one works at JLab, another is a professor at an east coast college; the others quit or went into... other fields, like finance). Although I am no longer a practicing biochemist, when we got together we complained about the exact same things. So yeah, I don't know about the intricacies of what happens in physics. But that doesn't mean I don't have real insight about what's going on.
    - anoncareer0212 6y ago
      sir this is a thread about Hubble data
      - dylan604 6y ago
        Whoa, there big fella! You've wandered away from the pack a little. Let's get you back with the herd before a wolf comes a-callin' Giddyup
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    I believe GP is trying to say that the people you hear the most from are not necessarily the real experts. The phenomenon of experts being silent while idiots make noise is damn near a human universal, so it's a hypothesis worth taking seriously regardless of the field. The problem is when people use that as an excuse to loudly substitute their own nonsense rather than try to find the actual experts.
    - inopinatus 6y ago
andrewflnr 6y ago
I suspect the fact that you can't observe dark matter directly, but physicists all seem to promote it, enables a combination of (at least superficially) reasonable empirical skepticism and conspiracy-minded contrarianism to work together. You have to expend a little bit of actual effort to see through the logic, and if you have any inclination to believe Big Physics is lying to you, then it's easy to just not bother. People forget that the universe does not owe us comprehensibility. Contrary to your linked comment, to this non-physicist, nearly all physicists in public seem to say that, while the details are unknown, dark matter is pretty much definitely a thing. AFAICT they're not wrong about there being multiple lines of evidence for it. But if you mean "no one worth listening to" says even that much, then I don't know any physicists worth listening to.
- ashildr 6y ago
  > but physicists all seem to promote it It does not seem like it to me (non physicist with some physicist friends from other fields who try to dumb down stuff to me). In my world (SE) it seems like a proprietary binary that must be included for the rest of an open source product describing the observable universe to work very well. Everyone seems to hate it, but nobody wrote something better, yet. Every competing implementation fails to work in other areas that we already are using in production, extensively. And when some professional, who read and understood the source code, starts talking about it, a lot of people voice stupid ideas that they would not have if they passed some lectures on the subject. Edit to add: I envy physicists a little - the best thing for “them” to happen seems to be if something does not work in a very peculiar way.
  - andrewflnr 6y ago
    Ok, but do any of them take seriously the idea that it doesn't exist at all? It was my impression that even theories that try to modify gravity in ways that also explain stuff like the CMB spectrum sort of end up inventing dark matter anyway (IIRC TeVeS was the big one like that).
coronadisaster 6y ago
maybe they just need to believe that dark matter is god's poop?
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't do this here.

seventytwo 6y ago

The attitude you’re describing is an epidemic right now. Maybe it’s always been like this, and it’s just a part of human nature, but it seems more prevalent than ever.

bsder 6y ago

> You demand that scientists be honest, then accuse them of all-out fraud when they admit they have questions, secure in your ignorance of the things they actually have figured out and tried to tell you over and over again. Because everybody thinks they can "intuit" their way to knowledge. No. No you can't. We KNOW you can't. We have experiments and statistics and double-blind trials for exactly this reason. "Intuition" only works when coupled with huge amounts of knowledge and effort. Part of the problem is that too many people never suffer the consequences of "truth" in modern society. Consequently, far too many people get the idea that "truth" is negotiable. But, this is not new: “There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” ― Issac Asimov

inopinatus 6y ago

If you've been raised on a intellectual diet of breakfast television, lip-service superstition, patriotic exceptionalism, and checkbox pedagogy, then you may not inwardly digest that knowledge progresses by incrementally pushing back the boundaries of ignorance, or its key corollary, that leading-edge discovery is driven by people with the most nuanced understanding of their own ignorance. The existential confrontation of research processes and discourse is such anathema to a prevailing mindset of certainty and explanation that a psychosis may develop. So bring your kids up to be comfortable with doubt, to inoculate them against becoming conspiracy nuts.

hindsightbias 6y ago

For every one of those here, there are 1,000X more out there like them. We’ve managed through this before, but social media has made anti-intellectualism the dominant strain of public expression. It is only natural for public leaders to follow. It’s where the action is. It was nearly a millenia between the sacking of Rome and the Renaissance. Intellectuals seem to have the idea that we can’t have that type of reset again. As populations options narrow with climate change and vaunted scientists fail to provide solutions, those populations will turn elsewhere.

friendlybus 6y ago
All my life the public has had an anti-intellectual bend to it. Which is fine, disagreement and conflict has it's place. People come with their preferred worldview. The issue is when luddites try to break printing presses, burn down labs and ignore true results when they appear.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]