You classify them as *pedantic* skeptics, while I say their skepticism is well founded. I used to be experimental physicist myself and have followed how, in particular high energy, physics has been presented by practitioners for at least three decades. And after seeing how all that focus and excitement have been unfounded more than a few times, you do get jaded.
Lots of people, physicists included, have criticized the funding allocation for high energy physics... that wasn't what we were talking about. Ironically, a lot of that criticism points out that clever astrophysical studies can be done more cheaply, including studies that work towards constraining what we loosely call dark matter.
No offense, but you seem to be changing the subject (former experimental physicist or no).
No offence, but I haven't changed the subject. I'm not talking about the cost of accelerators when I talk about HEP in this case, I talk about predictions of supersymmetry and new exotic particles that might actually make dark matter a real theory. You see, it's all part of the same.
