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Comment by rdw | Hacker News Reader

Dr. Hossenfelder has been on the beat of searching for mathematical ways of eliminating dark matter for some years. I hope she writes something about this paper.

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2019/10/dark-matter-nightm...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/07/evidence-for-modif...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/04/no-that-galaxy-wit...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2018/03/modified-gravity-a...

https://backreaction.blogspot.com/2016/10/modified-gravity-v...

As a counter, there's this article which lists a daunting number of phenomena that dark matter explains which competing theories have to also explain, and why that's very difficult: https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/only-dark-matter-and-n...

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"a daunting number of phenomena"

Well, yeah, when your model is a fudge factor that is independently parametrizable at every cubic parsec of space, you'd expect it to be able to explain a ton of things.

This is also my answer for the “why don’t you like dark matter?” question.

She doesn’t think this paper is very promising compared to MOND according to this twitter discussion https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1370113520998699013

If she thinks this needs to account for other things dark matter has glommed onto, it can only be because she is confused.

It wholly suffices for it (it being GR!) to account for rotation curves, and nothing but rotation curves. It doesn't even need to account for all curves, just a bunch. The more it does, the less DM there is room in the universe for.

It will then be Dark Matter advocates' problem to explain why it exists almost nowhere except in places that needed fudging.

I find it really hard to judge her - on the one hand I have read papers of hers that I enjoyed but equally she seems to be courting this weird populist movement by positioning herself as an outsider despite being a professional researcher in physics.

I think she is one of the brightest I've found communicating to laymen on social media platforms, but I agree, she definitely blurs the line of "anti-establishment entertainer" and "educator/professional" in her communications. I still don't think I could come to any conclusions about her without trying to understand how she communicates with peers outside of social media.

Those are not at all contradictory in actual practice. Outsiderness is multi-dimensional. And really, you want a populist leader who has a firm grip on the facts if you can get one. I don't think that's a good basis for criticism.

> I don't think that's a good basis for criticism.

I think it is if considering that she is one of the loudest voices talking negatively about the FCC - I'm personally not convinced either way, but when she is publishing slightly snarky things like this (http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2020/12/well-actually-10-ph...) it just seems like there's a personal vendetta of sorts going on. I'm not saying she's wrong but rather that it just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Most /r/physics threads where she is mentioned have fairly good dialectics about her

I'm not sure what you mean re the FCC, but that sounds like a different criticism than what I was responding to, which was based on her positioning herself as an outsider. I'm not necessarily disputing that she causes problems: I don't follow her closely enough to have an informed opinion.

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