I have no doubt that Robin Hanson is a brilliant man, and I am aware that he has an extremely strong physics background for a professor of economics, but it would seem prudent at this point for those of us who are not domain experts to have somewhat Bayesian anticipations regarding the cross-disciplinary adventurism of economics professors. People read his blog. If this thing is indeed a ball, there will be plenty of astrophysicists happy to pick it up and run with it.

This doesn't mean that you're wrong that the paper is wrong, but Dr. Hanson should absolutely not be our referent for certitude on the matter.

> If this thing is indeed a ball, there will be plenty of astrophysicists happy to pick it up and run with it.

This reminds me of what happened with Sir Atiyah and his 'proof' on Riemann hypothesis few years ago. Sir Atiyah, despite of being a well-known mathematician (but in a different discipline), got absolute silence from researching community and experts when he proposed his proof on Riemann hypothesis and connection of fine structure constant of physics to mathematics.

If experts stay silent, if your work gets no follow-up, it's likely that what you said is wrong or has no value to people.

Robin Hanson isn't the one saying it's wrong. A number of other physicists (e.g. Garrett Lisi as mentioned in the post) have said it's wrong, on the basis that the calculation is easy and when they do it they get a very different result. Hanson is just the one who claims to have found the particular error that the paper made, because nobody else thought it was worth bothering to find the particular error in a paper that got such an obviously wrong answer.