Re: 20 Years of Peter Woit's "Not Even Wrong"

Aether Regained <AetherRegaind@invalid.com> wrote:

https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=13864
 
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39753115
 
" When I started the blog I was 20 years past my Ph.D., in the middle of
some sort of an odd career. Today I'm 66, 40 years past the Ph.D., much
closer to the end of a career and a life than to a beginning. In 2004 I
was looking at nearly twenty years of domination of fundamental theory
by a speculative idea that to me had never looked promising and by then
was clearly a failure. 20 years later this story has become highly
disturbing. The refusal to admit failure and move on has to a large
degree killed off the field as a serious science. " -- Peter Woit

Anyone can say that something is 'not even wrong'. It is easy.
The hard thing is saying something that is wrong, or even better, right.

As long as you cannot do the latter, things that are 'not even wrong'
may be better than not saying anything at all,
because things might evolve, after all.

But, as Imre Lakatos has said:
Not condemning a theory, and career advice for aspiring students
are two very different things indeed,

Jan