Something that stuck with me was an article[1] describing how certain fields of medicine had languished, whereas others had made dramatic strides forward during the same period. For example, psychology is basically 90% hogwash. Meanwhile, the study of the the brain's biochemistry and therapeutic medication-based remedies for many common brain dysfunctions have made huge strides forward in recent decades.
Back in the mid 20th century, the only treatment for most brain-related problems was "talk to a psychiatrist". This generally did nothing except help psychiatrists rack up billable hours.
When medications eliminated the "need" for one-on-one therapy sessions, how do you think it went, trying to convince psychiatrists that their entire lucrative field is a giant waste of time?
Yeah.
Precisely how you think it went.
Similarly, when I was at University around the late 1990s, the entire field of AI research revolved around only logic. As in, some person or a few people had decided that the path to general intelligence was to be via "fuzzy logic", or "predicate logic", or "probabilistic logic", or... well... some kind of logic at any rate. We had to learn LISP, Prolog, and Boolean algebra, and so on.
That entire path was a giant waste of time, but... none of it was wrong. Not one bit. They were correct, confidently making slow but steady progress, and they weren't even going in the wrong direction! They were advancing AI! Just... very slowly, and with no chance at achieving the modern miracles of AI such a text-to-image generation. (DALL*E, Imagen, Stable Diffusion, etc...)
Let's circle back to Sabine's criticism of theoretical physics.
They're the same.
They're confident that they're correct because they're not wrong!
Sabine doesn't argue that they're wrong. I also don't believe physicists are wrong, and I've even studied physics to a graduate level, agreeing with at least 99% of it.
What I believe is that theoretical physics specifically has gone down a parallel path that leads to a dead end.
The path leads in the right direction, and every step along it leads to forward progress.
The issue is that there are people that simply refuse to believe that maybe, just maybe, we're all stuck in a dead end.
Quantum Mechanics researchers especially love to point to a small number of successes such as the precision numerical calculations related to the anomalous magnetic dipole moment of the electron as proof that they're on the right path. This is cheerfully ignoring the minor detail that the equivalent calculation for the muon has a 3.5 standard deviation error when compared to reality. Oops. Just ignore that. We're on the right path, remember, because the step we took with the electron was forward!
This is the problem.
I remember my professors being so earnest about AI and logic, and how "one day", there will be intelligent robots programmed in Prolog.
I also remember my Quantum Mechanics lessons where the professor very earnestly told me that microscopic systems change magically only when you look at them, which is patent nonsense, but is repeated to this day, just like Freud's idiocy is still taught to psychiatrists decades after much of their profession has been largely superseded by therapeutic drugs.
[1] I wish I could dig it up, but I read it over a decade ago. The gist is pretty clear though, in that not all "sciences" are equal, and small branches even within the same larger field are often dramatically more effective and/or correct due to "cultural" reasons, or a better approach. The article listed many examples, but the criticism of certain areas of medicine and psychology were the most scathing. For a similar rant, see Richard Feynman's take on the topic: http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html