Naturalness And Similar Delusions

"Naturalness" is not a real physics problem. The "hierarchy problem" and the "strong CP problem" and the "baryon asymmetry of the Universe problem", are likewise not real physics problems. These are just cases of unfounded conjectures about how Nature ought to be that are wrong.

At Quanta magazine, another article about the “naturalness problem”, headlined A Deepening Crisis Forces Physicists to Rethink Structure of Nature’s Laws. This has the usual problem with such stories of assigning to the Standard Model something which is not a problem for it, but only for certain kinds of speculative attempts to go beyond it. John Baez makes this point in this tweet:

Indeed, calling it a “crisis” is odd. Nothing that we really know about physics has become false. The only thing that can come crashing down is a tower of speculations that have become conventional wisdom.

James Wells has a series of tweets here, starting off with

The incredibly successful Standard Model does not have a Naturalness problem. And if by your criteria it does, then I can be sure your definition of Naturalness is useless.

He points to a more detailed explanation of the issue in section 4 of this paper.

My criticisms of some Quanta articles are motivated partly by the fact that the quality of the science coverage there is matched by very few other places. If you want to work there, they have a job open.

From Woit's "Not Even Wrong" blog.

I share Woit's opinion that Quanta is, on average, one of the better sources of science journalism directed to educated laypersons in the English language.