And that's the reason she's wrong?

You were the one introducing the argument "they are getting advantages out of it so we should be careful to not take what they say as an impartial view". Same can be told of Hossenfelder (personally, I would say that Hossenfelder has shown more clues that indeed she is not very reliable and would prefer caricatural sensationalistic descriptions, which is not what the typical string theory physicist does).

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chongli 3 hours ago | parent [-]

No, my point was only to refute the idea that people need to be egotistical or moronic (the only two options) to cling to an idea past its expiry date. People could also be “pot-committed” career-wise. Or they could have myriad other reasons (identity, sunk-cost fallacy, etc).

Nowhere did I suggest that “the reason for discrediting string theorists is that they have financial stakes in the idea.” Please try to be more charitable than that.

	▲	cauch 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You said > No, not morons, but people who have built a career on string theory. At this point, even if they regret their decisions, it’s too late to turn back now. This is not presented as "yet another option that may or may not be the reality", this is presented as your conclusion of why we observe what we observe. Maybe it is not what you are thinking, but you cannot blame people for interpreting your message the way you have written it. I agree with you that there are several options, one of the most probable, that you did not mention, is that the situation of the string theory is just "normal" and some idiots are not able to understand that.