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Is it that the methods required to do serious research on them ends up helping us discover other things?
Is there some deeper truth about the universe hidden in the prime numbers?
1) It's certainly not unheard of for theories have observational or experimental data appears that sends them back to the drawing board for reworking and do eventually get to a consistent state
2) Every other proposed theory to answer these questions ultimately ends up fitting the observational data we have even worse, or doesn't even attempt to explain it
3) Plenty of scientists are still poking at alternative theories and very few scientists love dark matter as an answer. They've just loved every proposed alternative less.
There's no shortage of dark matter detractors. It's just that none of them can come up with a better solution to answer questions about all the things that dark matter does answer. And no, just going "the gods did it" isn't better, because you can't use that as a theory to answer why some things are behaving the way they are, and we can with dark matter. And we do it quite often - far more often than we find weird things like these isolated quasars. But of course you don't get a front page hackernews article every time scientists apply science and things come out consistent with the existing science.
There's not some shadowy cabal of cosmologists doing everything in their power to keep the cult of dark matter alive. There's a bunch of experts who have seen the same arguments raised thousands of times with zero meaningful variation and have gotten tired of having to explain the same things over and over.
Sure. But when the socially dominant theory doesn’t fit observations, it’s called “a temporary setback that calls for some reworking”, and when a heterodox theory doesn’t fit observations, it’s called “falling flat on its face”, as you can see in another reply below. That’s not a healthy dynamic.
> There's not some shadowy cabal of cosmologists doing everything in their power to keep the cult of dark matter alive.
No… but curiously, you will get your comment flagged and removed on HN for making such a claim!
So cool! I’ve always felt there was something really interesting about the idea that someone might internalize the color blue as I see the color red. I know we can define the colors mathematically, but I never knew the term for that subjective interpretive difference—qualia.
Yes! In fact, philosophers have spent a lot of time thinking about this exact problem:
A sufficiently advanced jargon is indistinguishable from magic.
>eliminativist
Eliminativist claims in philosophy are claims that deny the existence of some class of entities. You can be eliminativist about all sorts of things - numbers, objective morals, countries, tables and chairs, etc.
>qualia
First-person conscious experiences. Pain is a qualia. The way the color blue looks, as opposed to say the color red or green, is a qualia. The sensation of hot or cold is a qualia.
When someone stubs their toe and says "ow", you can infer that they're in pain based on their behavior and your knowledge of how pain works, but you can't actually feel or directly observe their pain. That's the "first-person" part.
>phenomenal consciousness
A synonym for "qualia", because some philosophers started to feel like the word "qualia" had too much historical baggage, so they needed to come up with a new term.
>introspective illusion
Exactly what it says on the tin. An illusion (meaning, an impression that something is real, when it is in fact not) generated by introspection.
So, putting it all together:
>illusionism
Illusionism about consciousness is the thesis that phenomenal consciousness is not real. So, to give a specific example, an illusionist would be committed to the thesis that pain is not real. As a corollary, no one has ever felt pain before, because there is no such thing as pain. People have been under the illusion that they feel pain, but they actually don't.
It'd be like the ancient Romans speculating that cars will make us less fit and therefore cities will be less impressive because we can't lift as much. That isn't at all how it played out, we just build cities with machines too and need a lot less workers in construction.
Why does this seem to be a recurring pattern among the modern ultrawealthy? Does anyone who fails to bend over backwards for them just end up getting exiled? Have the elites through history always been this insecure or is it a modern phenomenon?
If you're wildly successful at something with significant real world influence, why would you care so strongly about something as relatively inconsequential as a board game or a video game? Being good at any kind of game is mostly a function of how much time and energy you've invested into it. If you claim to be an extremely hardcore worker who has any kind of family life there just aren't any leftover hours in the day for you to grind a top position in a game. And anyway, if you're playing games for fun and to bond with people, you probably shouldn't be playing tryhard optimal strategies every game, and should instead explore and experiment with more creative strategies. This is a lesson that took me a while to learn.