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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

“I have been working under the hypothesis that dark matter exists, so this result really surprised me,” Chae said. “Initially, I was reluctant to interpret our own results in favor of MOND. But now I cannot deny the fact that the results as they stand clearly support MOND rather than the dark matter hypothesis.”

https://scitechdaily.com/what-if-dark-matter-doesnt-exist-un...

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I saw that article the other day and decided not to submit it here on the basis I found that exact quote to be somewhat disingenuous considering his prior work includes very MOND-friendly stuff, eg.

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/451/2/1719/1749231

Nothing wrong with researching MOND, but then implying that you're from the opposite camp and this new result has been some sort of Road to Damascus moment made me sceptical as to this being anything new in what is still a minority theory.

That is a general pattern that I see a lot of these days: people pretending to have changed their minds by the sheer power of the evidence, when really they were always on side. Maybe we need a new word for this.

Confirmation bias?

Confirmation bias is an existing concept and may be a driver for the conviction but is not what’s happening here. It’s more akin to someone coming out and saying “I used to be a strong supporter for the democrats and voted for Hillary in the election, but the covid pandemic has made me a firm Trump supporter due to his beautiful handling of it!” And then someone finds a series of Tweets proving the person was openly supporting Trump during the election.

I would more refer to it as a false flag conversion. Pretend to be the enemy and come out with a fake story about how some compelling argument “forced you” to convert to the side that really is your true colors.

Losing sight of falsification as one of the primary drivers of good science has not been good for the scientific community.

Reluctance to interpret results in a certain way is how you end up with tainted data.

Every cosmologist worth their salt who thinks Dark Matter is the One True Way and that MOND (or anything else) is malarkey should re-evaluate what it means to be a scientist and start trying to falsify Dark Matter immediately.

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