As a complete physics layperson, I can’t comment with any authority on the subject matter.
What I do have is a metric fuckton of experience with incentives and mechanism design in technical fields: and mainstream physicists have been talking like people who have bonuses linked to specific outcomes for decades.
The moving goalposts around falsifiability, the too-coincidental synergies between supersymmetric-style (and there for string world) stuff and missing mass (dark matter), the growing group of highly-qualified skeptics, the curt public dismissals everything from LQG to constructor stuff to MOND as beneath refutation, the popularizers who go on PBS and don’t even acknowledge a debate.
And the alternative explanation, that it takes so long to learn this stuff that your career is over if Dark Matter or String Theory turns out to be hokum? Yeah, that scans.
What I do have is a metric fuckton of experience with incentives and mechanism design in technical fields: and mainstream physicists have been talking like people who have bonuses linked to specific outcomes for decades.
The moving goalposts around falsifiability, the too-coincidental synergies between supersymmetric-style (and there for string world) stuff and missing mass (dark matter), the growing group of highly-qualified skeptics, the curt public dismissals everything from LQG to constructor stuff to MOND as beneath refutation, the popularizers who go on PBS and don’t even acknowledge a debate.
And the alternative explanation, that it takes so long to learn this stuff that your career is over if Dark Matter or String Theory turns out to be hokum? Yeah, that scans.