3 ms·

Hacker News is just a part of the larger web. It's the same reason you see so many people arguing over lab leak, ketogenic diets, barefoot running. Anything wha

Hacker News is just a part of the larger web. It's the same reason you see so many people arguing over lab leak, ketogenic diets, barefoot running. Anything whatsoever that is vaguely heterodox and hints that you might have some knowledge that either the "establishment" doesn't know or is lying about is a tremendous ego boost. If your default position epistemically is you don't really have the expertise or time to investigate everything out there, which is more or less true for everyone no matter how intelligent you are or how much expertise you have on one specific topic, then if you're going to throw darts anyway, you may as well throw them at the target that, if correct, makes you look and feel just a little bit more special than the unwashed masses being spoonfed that food pyramid. I can't remember where at this point, but decades ago I heard this kind of thing called "insight porn" and have myself been guilty of it for much of my life. It's endemic to web communities composed of relatively smart people, at least if we take "smart" to mean something like intellectually curious and having right tail levels of raw cognitive ability, rather than meaning anything you believe is more likely to be true.

roywiggins 2y ago
MOND is also just a lot easier to feel like you understand than the zoo of proposed dark matter particles, so it sticks in the layman mind.
- TheBlight 2y ago
  Which best satisfies Occam's Razor? 1) The vast majority of matter in the Universe is invisible. We've tried looking for it in a variety of ways for decades but we can't find it but we're sure it's there. 2) Our model of the Universe is slightly incorrect. It works in many many cases but not in interesting outlier situations. eg. at very low accelerations.
  - roywiggins 2y ago
    MOND doesn't explain all of the missing mass, it just reduces it to a fifth of what it was. So you need MOND and something else, which is two things, which Occam's Razor disfavors anyway.
    - TheBlight 2y ago
      I don't necessarily believe canonical MOND is the answer, just that it seems more reasonable to me to assume we don't have the Universe completely figured out and accurately modeled just yet vs. being emphatically sure most matter never interacts with light but only with gravity despite continued failure in finding direct evidence of it because it would satisfy our current model without the need to adjust it.
    - naasking 2y ago
      > So you need MOND and something else, which is two things, which Occam's Razor disfavors anyway. Misapplication of Occam's razor. LCDM also needs multiple things: non-interacting dark matter + a fine-tuned distribution of DM that cannot be a priori predicted from any observations, but only post-hoc fitted after observation. By contrast, MOND has successfully predicted rotation curves (and lots more) from the visible matter alone. You can't naively apply Occam's razor to two theories that both fail some set of observations. However, as a scientific theory, MOND has a better track record of successful predictions.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    It took us until the 20th century to discover radiation, despite it having extremely direct and powerful interactions. Gravity is a shitty, weak interaction that we largely don't have a full understanding of, so why is it so unlikely we haven't properly discovered matter that only interacts weakly with gravity? How the hell else would we "discover" it?
ljsprague 2y ago
Great comment. (It was clearly a lab leak though.)

roywiggins 2y ago

MOND is also just a lot easier to feel like you understand than the zoo of proposed dark matter particles, so it sticks in the layman mind.

TheBlight 2y ago
Which best satisfies Occam's Razor? 1) The vast majority of matter in the Universe is invisible. We've tried looking for it in a variety of ways for decades but we can't find it but we're sure it's there. 2) Our model of the Universe is slightly incorrect. It works in many many cases but not in interesting outlier situations. eg. at very low accelerations.
- roywiggins 2y ago
  MOND doesn't explain all of the missing mass, it just reduces it to a fifth of what it was. So you need MOND and something else, which is two things, which Occam's Razor disfavors anyway.
  - TheBlight 2y ago
    I don't necessarily believe canonical MOND is the answer, just that it seems more reasonable to me to assume we don't have the Universe completely figured out and accurately modeled just yet vs. being emphatically sure most matter never interacts with light but only with gravity despite continued failure in finding direct evidence of it because it would satisfy our current model without the need to adjust it.
  - naasking 2y ago
    > So you need MOND and something else, which is two things, which Occam's Razor disfavors anyway. Misapplication of Occam's razor. LCDM also needs multiple things: non-interacting dark matter + a fine-tuned distribution of DM that cannot be a priori predicted from any observations, but only post-hoc fitted after observation. By contrast, MOND has successfully predicted rotation curves (and lots more) from the visible matter alone. You can't naively apply Occam's razor to two theories that both fail some set of observations. However, as a scientific theory, MOND has a better track record of successful predictions.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  It took us until the 20th century to discover radiation, despite it having extremely direct and powerful interactions. Gravity is a shitty, weak interaction that we largely don't have a full understanding of, so why is it so unlikely we haven't properly discovered matter that only interacts weakly with gravity? How the hell else would we "discover" it?

ljsprague 2y ago

Great comment. (It was clearly a lab leak though.)