Thread by @DudeDarkmatter

Oh, Ethan. There you go again.

https://twitter.com/StartsWithABang/status/1022482229895737345

Ethan Siegel has made it clear that he hated MOND. Over the years he has made it a personal crusade to persecute the heretics who dare speak of such things. Because nothing says scientific rationality like as hominem attacks.

Mostly I ignore him.

Here he crosses a line, accusing yours truly of cheating. This is an unjustifiable ad hominem attack. It has no place in science.

The issue is not one of cheating, but of interpretation, and how to weigh various contradictory lines of evidence.

I have bent over backwards to review ALL the data and discuss it objectively. If I privilege evidence for the cosmic microwave background, I come to the same conclusion as he does - and have said so in the refereed literature. arxiv.org/abs/1404.7525

That’s not the only evidence. If I privilege galaxy dynamics, I come to a different conclusion. So, how do we weigh these disparate lines of evidence? That’s what I struggle with in arxiv.org/abs/1404.7525 and a host of other papers.

Maybe I’m wrong, but it isn’t for a lack of looking at all sides of the problem - something Ethan has made clear he is incapable of doing. And I’ve done it in the refereed scientific literature, not just the editorially unsupervised Internet rants that are Ethan’s M.O.

Indeed, this is the perfect example of the flattening the Internet has led to, such that crazy talk is placed on equal footing with actual expertise. So which of us is the expert? Any random reader of his on Twitter has no way to tell. So I’ll provide one.

First, let me make the distinction between two related but distinct careers: science and science communication. Some of us, like @skdh , manage to do both. I am pretty much a pure scientist. Ethan is a science communicator.

He talks the talk. I walk the walk.

There is a wonderful way to search the scientific literature provided by the NASA astrophysical data system. Anybody may type our names into it to see what our scientific contributions have been
adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_servi…
So let’s see what the record shows, shall we?

Searching for refereed papers by “Siegel, Ethan” shows a Ph.D. thesis and 6 papers with a total of 220 citations. The most recent first author paper is from 2005. Ethan appears to have devoted his energies since then to the worthy cause of science communication, not new science.

Typing my own name into ADS return 114 refereed papers that have been cited 9,862 times. If that sounds like a large number, it is. 32 of those papers have been cited over 100 times each. 11 have been cited more than all of Ethan’s papers put together.

I have made substantial contributions to a wide variety of different fields, including low surface brightness galaxies, stellar populations, gaseous nebulae, cosmology, and both dark matter and modified gravity. The value of these contributions are reflected I the citation stats.

I’m a full professor at an R1 university. That means I’ve been held to high standards- incredibly high, given the controversial nature of some of the things I’ve worked on. I’ve excelled. To make a sports analogy, I’m one of the stars you hope your team can pick up in free agency

Ethan is a blogger.

So, who’s the expert here? The guy who does the science, or the one who blogs about it?

I have good reasons to be skeptical of dark matter. It is Ethan who selectively chooses to ignore important pieces of the evidence, not me. He is the Fox news of science communication.

I believed in dark matter before becoming skeptical. Maybe I’m wrong to be so, so I’ve set criteria as to what would change my mind: detect dark matter & find a satisfactory DM explanation for galaxy dynamics.

I wonder what evidence could change Ethan’s mind. Is that possible?