Asking questions is fine, but making a claim like "dark matter is not a real thing" with certainty is premature and does not predispose others to taking you seriously.
It's not really any of my business, but in your shoes I would be making sure to disclaim these statements regarding MOND as secondhand opinion rather than presenting them as established scientific fact.
- It's a debate, not a settled fact.
- When your opening salvo describes the other side as "stupid and ludicrous" you should not be surprised that some people respond with hostility in kind.
- Having studied something somewhat intensely for 20 weeks doesn't put your personal opinion on the subject on a higher standing than people who have studied this at a high academic level for a lifetime. You're free to make arguments, but not to proclaim absolute truths.
- For the particular article we're discussing: A galaxy that seems to have no rotational speed anomaly is a blow for both CDM & MOND theories, but it would seem to be a bigger blow for MOND (e.g. CDM anomaly could just be a weird distribution of dark matter).
- I already was not surprised by the HackerNews crowd responding with hostility.
- I am pointing the HackerNews crowd to people who have studied this at a high level for a lifetime. Moti Milgrom. Stacy McGaugh. Pavel Kroupa.
- This article is actually a blow to bad journalism. This article is also an opportunity to call out that what "cold dark matter" is, is actually bad machine learning, where academics forcefit a new blob of invisible, noninteracting matter for every galaxy, which gives cold dark matter (CDM) no predictive power. Contrast with modified gravity (MOND), which models acceleration as sqrt(GM/R^2 * cH/(2pi)), which has predictive power.
You -opened- with hostility.
> - I am pointing the HackerNews crowd to people who have studied this at a high level for a lifetime. Moti Milgrom. Stacy McGaugh. Pavel Kroupa.
And ignoring the other side, presenting it as settled.
Read your opening statement. It is not conducive to discourse. It just flames CDM without advancing any argument of its own.
It doesn't matter the topic: if I think, say, global warming critics elsewhere have been jerks, I still don't improve things if I talk in roaring hyperbole and dismissiveness in statements about it here. I won't get listened to, and I won't improve the quality of discourse.
From the first two site guidelines for comments:
> Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Continuing on to:
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
So this is an excuse to be rude to different random strangers here, because they might (or might not) share some views with the people acting in the way you don't like?
I'm really patiently trying to explain this to you. "These other people were rude first" is never a good argument. It's even worse when the "other people" aren't here or a party to the discussion.
But the poster in question opened with a salvo just denigrating all the other options without any information in defense of his view. This shouldn't be lauded. It opens no interesting line of discourse.
I never said he repeated himself. I just said his opening gambit in the conversation was a salvo that merely denigrated the other options without any information in defense of his view.
This tends to not invite productive discourse.
Anyone paying attention to experts knows that none of them, including the ones you cite (McGaugh et al), speak with the certainty that you do. All of them readily admit that there are problems with both leading theories. So when you “explain” to everyone why their stupid ideas are stupid, it comes off as cheerleading born out of either naïveté or intellectual dishonesty, and harms your credibility. “MOND is obviously incomplete and I despair of making it into a proper theory. LCDM has no realistic chance of explaining MOND’s many predictive successes. Right now, we’re hosed.” - Stacy McGaugh
It’s a bit funny that you then go on to talk down on “the HN Crowd” downthread - the most common complaint I usually hear about “the HN Crowd” is best summed up as “it’s full of people who think a computer science degree makes them an expert in everything.”
I did the math; still just one in seven billion.
Building websites and collating data isn’t that novel these days. It’s not like you alone collected it or defined any of the first principles.
Welcome to being a normie.