Well said, and not to mention the importance of common knowledge as a driving impetus for enacting a change. "Everyone knows Hollywood is full of abuse" was true for decades but when the Weinstein allegations finally came out into the open, some (if not enough) action finally started happening against it. Saying the obvious thing loudly and openly is a coordinating mechanism.
Land is a Big Deal is a great place to start (and his three articles summarising Georgism for SSC, also on his substack named after Henry George's book "Progress and Poverty", which contain much of the same content).
Skyfield is very cool. For my wedding, I wanted to give my groomspeople personalised thank you gifts. The idea I came up with was to find or ask for precise dates significant to them each (their own anniversaries, birthdays, special events...) and convert that into an abstraction of the relative positions of the planets on that day using Skyfield: https://imgur.com/l7G0att (and with the moon's orbit if they wanted: https://imgur.com/CYqfLR4).
They were super happy with the result, and we all looked great on the day. I wonder if there's a market for these but it feels a little niche, I'm glad skyfield exists to help projects like these.
I make multispectral Sun images (https://imgur.com/UMQhcw6) for people occasionally based on a time & date, I started messing around with the idea for my son, and then as a gift for a friend and she then helped me get a page up https://www.theremarkablz.com/thesun
It's often for sciency people who have just had a kid, because with the SDO images you can get really close to the specific time of birth.
While not exactly the same, I got my wife a framed print of the stars over our wedding day as an anniversary gift a few years after we were married.
It may be a little niche, but I think there is a market for that kind of thing.
Everyone always misses the corollary to this "groupthink is why we have dark matter" theory which is that academics are very heavily incentivized to try and overturn conventional dark matter because it would be an absolute career-maker to have a credible alternative (and get credit for upturning a widely accepted theory). And in fact lots of people have tried various MOND theories etc but the reason Lambda-CDM persists for so long is because it still fits the data the best.
Dark matter arose because of gaps in the current particle theory. These gaps grow the further out we observe and become significant enough to disqualify gravity as a constant for the formation of galaxies. Dark matter provides an incomplete solution to these gaps just as dark energy is an incomplete stop gap to Einstein’s cosmological constant.
The logic is as follows:
* There are gaps in current models that otherwise invalidates math and disqualifies observed measures.
* Dark matter/energy provide a partial solution that may or may not exist but are sufficient to performed qualified measures across observed space.
* Therefore dark matter/energy provide utility value that for conducting measures that otherwise observationally contradict.
* Therefore dark matter/energy must be because they are qualified as such by the math.
This problem is syllogistic wherein a series of propositions are individually true and linked so therefore the conclusion of such linkage must be true, but it isn’t. In physics truths exist as proofs. The problem isn’t that dark matter exists or not, but that incomplete logic demands it must exist.
Again, it is a confidence problem, that it must exist and anything to the contrary should be censored to hell. People have staked their entire professional reputations on this confidence built on logic, not observation.
The actual physics problem that produces all this mess in the first place is observational limitation. Already the JWST is slowly peeling back some reliance on magic solutions allowing for alternate considerations and better math. Ultimately we will need to observe the universe from outside the solar system and it’s internal distortions.
I don't quite understand the words you're using in your "the logic is as follows" list. (What are "gaps that otherwise invalidates math and disqualifies observed measures"? Really, what are "observed measures"? What does it mean to "performed qualified measures"? etc.)
To a substantial extent, it kinda feels like what you're describing is literally the scientific method. We discover observations that are inconsistent with existing models, so we develop a new model that (within their realm of validity) correctly match the data, and when we continue to find that the new model successfully describes new observations our confidence in the model goes up (and eventually rises to the level of saying "this seems to be a correct description of reality").
Maybe if I understood the exact meaning of your words here, I'd understand how what you're talking about differs from that and what your concerns are. But as I've said elsewhere, I really don't see where this is a "confidence problem", and I've never had reason to believe that alternatives are "censored to hell". There are people who've built entire careers publishing papers studying MOND, after all. It just doesn't seem to work as well as dark matter (Lambda-CDM) to explain the copious data that we now have.
And I'll definitely push back (again) against calling the case for dark matter "an observational limitation". These are quantitative, positive observations that demand some model to explain them. The specific quantitative amounts and distributions of dark matter necessary to explain galaxy rotation curves also turned out to be the same specific details necessary to explain gravitational lensing observations. As new observations have come in over the years, the case for dark matter has gotten stronger. (That's why it's become a dominant belief among experts.) So I genuinely don't have any idea what you're getting at with those comments.
I’m no specialist of the question, but from what I got, ok the standard model doesn’t match what we can observe in astronomic features, unless we suppose some untrackable heavy weight is there though not measurable with our contemporary tools.
So the basic paths are, we admit there is indeed some entity like this, or we need a new model that can also encompass these observations without new object type.
MOND (Modified Newtonian Dynamics) is a minority (not mainstream) theory in physics, that maybe Newton's law of gravity doesn't work the same over galactic distances. After all, we have only tested the law in length scales smaller than our own solar system.
You also have to know, that the observed rotation speeds of galaxies do not fit with estimated amount of visible stars (and their mass) in the galaxy. We basically can not explain why galaxies rotate at the speeds they do.
MOND suggests that the shape of the gravity law changes, over very large distances.
The mainstream explanation is Dark Matter: Galaxies have more mass than we can see, and that makes them rotate differently that what their number and mass of stars would suggest.
Lambda-Cold-Dark-Matter: Lambda is the name of the cosmological constant, cold dark matter is about the simplest possible model for the unseen dark matter: It is cold (no fast moving particles, meaning no particles like photons that move at relativistic speeds), dark (we cannot see it), and it is matter (provides gravity).
This is the traditional, mainstream cosmological model in its simple form.
Certainly useful for thinking, but its lack of falsifiability, predictive power or validation is indeed why there's so much controversy around it and why it remains a hypothesised model rather than widely accepted scientific fact. The best you can do is test the assumptions of the model itself, or its constituent terms.
I find this kind of sentiment a little vacuous. Charitably, we might say "Much of the non-human life on Earth will be just fine without humans" but the kinds of ecological disaster that would wipe us would would take a significant chunk of other life along with it. Beyond that, what value is a floating chunk of rock except for the very fact it sustains conscious life, the only thing capable of valuing it? Humans, and other forms of life, are pretty much entirely what makes Earth worth caring about at all.
The early research in support of this conclusion (despite the fact no subsequent research has born it out) was pure charlatanism, bad science and the theory is rightly derided because those who continue to propagate it do so out of naked self interest and financial gain: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BIcAZxFfrc
No because the marginal returns on utility to the average individual from working less is far, far, far greater than the marginal returns to utility to already insanely wealthy shareholders from squeezing a worker for all they're worth.
The marginal returns on the individual then manifest as returns to the broader society, happier 99.99% outweighs the earnings of the billionaires in terms of societal impact and QoL improvements. But sadly, we don’t make the rules.
That is again reiterating their point that it is favorable only to the small portion of insanely wealthy shareholders and does not even favor the overwhelming majority of shareholders too who are not insanely wealthy.
