String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.
When people make these comments about string theory, are they at the forefront of quantum physics theory and have spent years on modern string theory? Or did they just watch a YouTube video and then keep parroting this?
You could reductio ad-absurdum this logic quite broadly. We all form beliefs about the world and its aspects, and almost always through fallible sources. Should one be confident about ones of questionable provenance? I say no. But forming beliefs from the information we have is a useful skill.
Nothing wrong with learning and being influenced. However, many posters on HN are very confident that string theory is a dead end. It makes me question if they’ve done cutting edge string theory or it is just some random software engineers who watched Sabina on YouTube.
In the age of infinite bullshit generators, the even more useful skill is being able to say "I don't know." Or "I'm not qualified to have a useful opinion on this so I'm just not going to say anything." I could write a bunch of stuff about my personal opinions on string theory and waste everyone's time, or I could just shut up and not be a human stoichastic parrot.
This isn't a great argument. Researchers who do not think string theory is good are not going to spend years on it. There are plenty of experts that dismiss string theory. I have no skin in the game, and don't care either way, fwiw.
I don't think someone needs to be a (former) string theorist to have an informed opinion on string theory, but I do think they should at least have a physics research background. Like, if someone can't explain what second quantization is, then why should I care about their opinion on string theory at all? There's just not that much room for a discerning conversation. (With the obvious caveat that I have different expectations for a real-life conversation than a discussion forum.)
Our grandparent is sort of the perfect example of an insight-free comment: confidently claiming string theory is useless (without supporting evidence) and then claiming (more like imagining, since there's again no evidence provided here) that an LLM would have abandoned such a research program long ago. What's there to discuss? The comment is based on a made-up scenario; it is, in other words, pure fiction.
The Lambda-CDM model seems to be a dead end, but instead of recognising that, picking themselves up, and moving on, the Lambda-CDM Model Industrial Complex simply papered over the gaping holes with magical thinking.
I also just keep parroting that the Earth is not flat and a bunch of other things I've been told and then never questioned, since it seems to make sense.
When the flath-earth craze started I've been trying to at least get that bit actually personally verified. Haven't managed to do it to this day, though. So I'll just keep parroting various things without properly understanding them.
Your drive to verify must be very low then. There are hundreds of small logic reasonings or even experiments with which you can easily prove that a flat earth model is at least very complicated or even impossible.
Explaining Moon phases gets very complicated in any flat earth model. With binoculars you can see the shadows of craters on the moon's terminator. Or the phases of Venus whereas Mars doesn't have any.
Timezones are ridiculously hard to explain on a flat earth.
A proper theory must explain all of them and no flat earth model can do that. A round Earth OTOH easily does.
None of that is an actual verification of round (or kinda potato shaped) Earth. You are just choosing to not think too deeply about it, essentially parroting things, just like I am.
Disproving flat Earth does not verify round Earth, after all. And all your listed refutations of flat Earth do not really disprove anything, either. They might, if you do the actual work, but you did not, choosing to just parrot someone that did put in the work.
Which was my point. It is much easier to speak vaguely and reference things than it is to actual prove something rigorously.
Disproving flat Earth doesn't logically prove round Earth, sure. But that's not how empirical reasoning works. If one model explains a bunch of observations naturally while another needs increasingly elaborate patches, that's evidence in favor of the first model.
There's a difference between "I haven't verified this myself" and "there is no good reason to believe this." You're conflating the two.
But then I've given you a few examples of thought and actual experiments that are very easy to do. That's the opposite of parroting as you can use your own mind to ponder those. But you seem to want to be ignorant, claiming that two theoretical models are equally bad just because you don't want to consider their properties for a second.
I'm not disagreeing with your conclusion. All I'm saying is that I'm just parroting these things without actually verifying them - and so are you. If flat Earth gets you all excited, I can also explain the concept with Pythagoras' theorem.
I never did a formal proof of it, yet I just use it because it works and I'm pretty sure it's true. Someone else proved it and I'm just parroting that without ever even having bothered to read the proof.
I’m disagreeing that I am just parroting things. Parroting is mindlessly repeating something. I don’t claim that all my thoughts are original but some are at least independent and self derived.
We have 2500 years of epistemology. Individual humans can reach knowledge to various degrees. It’s not a binary state of knowing or not knowing.
Take the Pythagoras example then. How is it different from parroting if you never even read and understood the proof? And alright, parroting might be a negative word and you could want to use a fancy word saying you're following heuristics instead. But it doesn't change that you maintain and propagate knowledge that you have not personally verified in a rigorous sense.
There are examples of things written in school books that were just plain wrong because no one bothered to properly verify it. We all settle for "good enough" most of the time.
> When the flat-earth craze started I've been trying to at least get that bit actually personally verified. Haven't managed to do it to this day, though.
How do I say this in the most gentle way I can...?
Your brain is broke. No, seriously. If you can help it, try not to argue with anyone about anything, ever. You have a demonstrated inability to think clearly.
The error with this approach is that every single physics theory gets exactly the same criticisms.
You can take any of the theories that Hossenfelder would spend time on instead of the ones she does not like, and you would find (basically) a similar percentage of physicists saying it's a mistake to continue in this direction.
In other terms: for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it (number made up for illustration, and there is probably some variations, but you get the gist). You took one theory and found few physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it. You conclude, incorrectly, that it means this theory is fundamentally differently treated as any other theories.
(on top of that, it is unfortunate that Hossenfelder later screw up her image by doing way too much mistakes that someone reliable would not do)
I did not ignore Susskind at all. I literally say "for each physics theory, on 100 physicists, you have 5 physicists saying it is a mistake to continue working on it". I mentioned the name of Hossenfelder, but you can replace it by "Susskind" or "Hossenfelder and Susskind", and the argument is as valid.
As for Susskind, the fact that he was a main contributor is not a factor, on the contrary, what I had in mind is about the percentage of experts in the subject that later criticize the field. You have plenty of other examples in other fields: Shiffman on SUSY, Loeb on WIMP, Hirsch on applied fusion, ... or even Einstein on quantum physics ("Yes, I may have started it but I always regarded these ideas as temporary. I never thought that others would take them so much more seriously than I did.")
Some outsiders are seeing a normal scientific process where people are continuously questioning the validity or the efficiency of things, and they start in their fantasy "look, they say it should not be done this way, it's the proof it's all wrong".
Again, what we observe with String Theory is not at all exceptional. The reason it is "a big deal" is because of the populist message and the scam around "these physicists who stole the public money". It is a bit like "vaccines cause autism": it got some media attention, it resonated with the populist conspiracy theory of "the physicists know but they are farming money" and the anti-intellectual trend, and now it has become both some kind of cultural war and an easy way to farm views and followings and show themselves as "so rebel, so edgy".
Don't get me wrong, I personally think that String Theory is overrated (and I was thinking that way before it was popular to criticize it). And the return of the pendulum means that it may now be in the edge side of the average. But nothing significant to pretend there is a particular dysfunction.
The argument that I'm making was not at all discussed in the video. Can you point to the exact time in the video this argument is made?
It looks like you just took a video with someone defending string theory and simply concluded that we have the same arguments.
My point is that you could build a similar panel (with some eminent physicists pro and con investing in the theory) about more or less all cutting-edge theories. This is just a normal situation to have. Some people don't think string theory is a good use of time, others think it is. The video you presented is just that. It does not demonstrate that having this situation is specific to string theory.
But on the core of the video, I don't find it very interesting. It's a shame because I personally find string theory overrated and I don't like it much, but it is sad to see that there is no good arguments against it.
In the video, Penrose's argument was just "I disagree on some aspect and I don't find it elegant". Big whoop, this happens all the time. He also admits that he does not know enough about it, and when he brings specifics, Greene reacts as if the objections were trivial things he and his colleagues also thought about but realised were not in fact a problem.
Not sure what to say about Weinstein. He basically ends up saying what I just said in my previous paragraph here: Penrose did not provide much argument, just "I don't find it beautiful". That being said, it's a bit strange to see him there as he has a bad reputation as a scientist (not sure I should go into details, but he claimed to have a terrific unified theory for years, TGU, and when he finally explained it publicly, the whole scientific community saw it was nonsense, which is not something you expect for someone who is reliable when talking about science). It does not mean that he may not have good points sometimes, but having pseudoscientists presented as scientists on the panel is not the best.
In fact, the situation is a bit like in open source free software: you have always people saying "you should not work on that, you should work on this instead". People working on KDE are "wasting everyone's time" for not working on Gnome and inversely. People working on a new software when alternatives exist are "bad for the community". And people using a given development paradigm are "fundamentally wrong" according to people who like the other paradigm.
So, in fact, another way of putting my argument: string theory is not particularly bad, what we see around it is in fact so common that you even see it around KDE vs Gnome.
What are you talking about? This is not my argument, this is a different argument.
His intervention (which is not even really an argument) is that "physicists chose what to work on and some of them think string theory is interesting" (and I think his interlocutor failed to provide any rebuttal to that. Weinstein counter-argument is "their choices have side effect so they should make the choice I prefer" which does not really hold water).
My point is that this specific debate that we observe around string theory happens in plenty of cutting edge physics and string theory is not "special".
In the section you mention, Greene does not even mention or make any reference of the situation in any other field than string theory. How is that even barely related?
When people discuss what to do after LHC, some people say "let's prepare for building a Future Circular Collider", to which some physicists are saying "no, that's a bad idea and a waste of money and time". Other people say "let's focus on other ways to probe particles with different kind of detectors", to which some physicists are saying "no, that's a stupid bad and a waste of money and time". Other people say "let's not continue to explore particle physics", to which some physicists are saying "no, that's a bad idea and a waste of money and time".
Whatever you say about what to do after LHC, they will always have people saying it's a bad idea. Maybe you have a personal opinion of what would be best, in which case, you are exactly in the same position as Greene: there will be people who will say "no, I don't like that".
("what to do after LHC" is just an example. There are plenty of other topics: do exotic physics or precision measurement, approach the problem top-down or bottom-up, cold fusion, modified gravity, supersymmetry, ...)
> It's also "out-brute forcing them." It just never gets tired. If a mathematician picks a research direction and spends a whole week on it and it doesn't pan out, they will likely be annoyed, need a break for a while, etc. This thing just does not ever get tired or discouraged or care; it's just onto the next thing until something ends up working.
> String theory is a great example of a dead end kept alive by ego and sunk cost fallacy. An AI would have declared it dead and moved on 10 years earlier.
Not only are LLMs perfect machines with all the intelligence of humanity without any of our problems, they are also everything else. I wait to get my hands on one of those LLMs people on hn seem to be using. I want to believe too. Let me into the religion of the perfect thinking machine gods.
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.
I don't think it's a good argument. String theory is just "one application" of advanced mathematical physics. It's like saying that software developers specialised in ReactJS would lose their career if ReactJS is suddenly abandoned.
Not a fair comparison because one is exposed to real life market forces vs. academic inertia.
ReactJS devs will retrain when the market dies. Professors still publishing theories/experiments costing large amounts of public monies better spent elsewhere.
There is no more inertia in the academic sector than in the software developer sector.
You have tons of software developers that cling to their preferences for ages. They have their beloved language, or beloved paradigm, and they will invent any excuse to explain how relevant it is. It is also visible with current LLM, where there are plenty of software developer islands where they blanket ban LLM usage as an emotional response. There is a big contrast with the academic sector where the most sceptical people did not blanket banned it, but find way to put guardrails (and I'm sure you can find anecdotal places that are emotionally against LLM in academia, but it is an order of magnitude lower than in the software development sector).
Same about "real life market forces". Especially when at the same time people criticize, correctly, the "publish or perish" hyper-competitiveness problem in academia. The reality is that a physicist need to retrain plenty of time, probably as much as a ReactJS dev. But that reality flies high above the head of people who jump into the first caricatural idea they have about the sector.
As for "costing large amounts of public monies", you don't seem to even know what you are talking about. String Theory probably costs society way less than plenty of other useless things, and still managed to provide very useful tools that are used in mathematical physics outside of string theory (not that I'm saying it was worth it, but it is just not fair to pretend that they did not produce anything). In contrast, the software development sector has a huge contribution on enshittification, stealing user data, making porn, creating social media addiction and creating financial bubbles that splash in the whole economy. Between the two, there is clearly one that is way more toxic on the society.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not interested in "taking side" and particularly defending physicists. I'm sure they are making mistakes and wasting money, like any other sectors, and that we still should find these places and fix them. But your depiction is so caricatural that I had to rebalance the situation by reassessing the facts.
There is no more inertia in the academic sector than in the software developer sector.
That is not true. In academia you have extremely niche research specializations and tenure as two major contributors to inertia. In general software development you have an enormous amount of career mobility.
Software developers learn new languages, new frameworks, new tools, new development methodologies all the time. A string theorist who decides to pivot away from string theory essentially has to start their career over from scratch. It’s not even close!
It's not even clear where String Theory is categorized in this article. Maybe High Energy Physics? Maybe Condensed Matter? It already shows how broad it is, as they already consider that people with such a different specific subject (for example theoretical dark matter in HEP or superconductivity in Condensed Matter) are not even "changing field" when they move to String Theory.
In this article, you can see on Figure 1 that about 65% of physicists (similar in HEP and CondMatter) are also working on subjects that are in one other category (so, it's not even that the person is doing String Theory and another subject inside their own group, like dark matter or superconductivity, it is more like String Theory and Astrophysics).
In Figure 2, you can see that 38% (resp. 21%) that have started their career as specialist in HEP (resp. CondMatter) ended up changing specialisation within about 5 years. (and this is "voluntary", it means that "changing specialisation" is in reality pretty easy, as of course the majority of people could change easily but just decide not to because they don't see the point of changing)
Even without this study, you can easily check the reality yourself. If I do a search on "computational tools for string theory", the first result I get is https://compstring.org/.
First, if you look at the list of participants, you will notice their CVs and how diverse they are, with background or even current activities in: SUSY, QFT, CFT, condensed matter, cosmology, quantum gravity, black hole thermodynamics, ...
Second, if you look at the software, you will see the majority are very recent (2025, 2023 and 2025). Each of them require learning the specific framework, with new rules, new ways of describing the problem and new ways of making the software do what you want. This is similar to passing from ReactJS to Angular (both are about 10 years old, so in fact, the String Theory community seems to change framework more often than devs).
You can also look up in wikipedia, the famous names in String Theory, they all have plenty of activities that go well beyond string theory (which means the reality is even stronger, as they were not even forced to do something else, they've done it because it was trivial for them to also work on these subjects): Maldacena and Susskind on black holes and wormholes, Shenker on quantum chaos, Seibert on SUSY, Strominger on gravitational waves, Fischler on blackholes production in particle colliders, Kounnas on GUTs, ...
> A string theorist who decides to pivot away from string theory essentially has to start their career over from scratch. It’s not even close!
That's just factually not true. And I've provided data that demonstrate that. It looks like you have no idea what a string theorist is doing and how they can transition to another field.
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).
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.
> 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.
This is a pretty silly belief to hold about science. Plenty of strong, well held standards of the modern era were considered ridiculous fringe beliefs a century ago.
Not taking either side here - but surely a lot of cosmological phenomena couldn't be testable/verifiable at the time they were theorized either?
(thinking of black holes for example - they were theorized way before we had observations. And presumably a lot of particle physics can similarly be theorized before we built the technology to experimentally verify them)
Black holes were theorized and you could design experiments that, given the proper instruments, would allow them to be detected. Relativity was similar (famously, the curvature of spacetime was demonstrated during a solar eclipse by being able to see stars that should have been behind the sun).
String theory has nothing even theorized that would allow us to prove it.
String theory, being a high-energy theory, predicts that at high energies things will look “stringy.” It’s not untestable in principle. But it is out of reach of current experiments. I think that distinction is important.
Same as the parallel comment: the situation of string theory is the same as with black holes and relativity. It is not it is not testable, it is that it is not testable yet. The situation is very similar of the situations of black holes and relativity at their own time.
The fact that so many people, like you, just INVENT that it is not testable is quite worrying. Why? What's the point of doing that?
No one has "invented" that it's untestable. String theory literally doesn't give predictions that would allow it to be falsified. There are an astounding number of possible geometries that mean that any set of data could technically be "consistent with string theory". There are no specific energy bounds where it kicks in - if an experiement doesn't show existence of strings, it's "try again with more energy" instead of "falsified".
String theory can't be disproved even in theory. Spending decades on that is akin to spending decades rearchitecting your software to make it more beautiful and full of design patterns and promising users/management that some day it'll all make sense.
First, it is incorrect to say that "any set of data is consistent with string theory". For example, string theory is death in water if we observe a single Majorana fermion with no partner at a comparable scale. This is an observation that fully falsifies string theory.
But more importantly, "falsifiable" means "observations reduce the landscape". It does not matter if the landscape never fully disappear, as long as the observations constrain the parameters of the theory, then the theory is falsifiable. This is the real condition for a theory to be unfalsifiable. Astrology is not falsifiable: whatever the observation, the full astrology theory remains exactly the same, nothing has been constrained.
Why is it the correct definition? Because your definition leads to illogical situations. For example, I can divide "string theory" into "string theory of region 1", "string theory of region 2", "string theory of region 3", ... which are all in different parameters space. In this case, suddenly, "string theory of region 1" can be fully excluded. But it is illogical to pretend that "string theory of region 1" is suddenly "good falsifiable science" just because you renamed it while the physics is 100% the same. Another example of illogical situation is "an observed theory suddenly qualifies as falsifiable" (cf. the example with the electromagnetism below).
Also, "try again with more energy" is very common in beyond standard model physics. It is the case for lepton compositeness, heavy bosons, fourth lepton generation, SUSY, all of Effective Field Theory, ... None of these theories are abandoned because "unfalsifiable". The argument that string theory is bad because unfalsifiable feels like a bad faith argument while plenty of other physicists activities have the same characteristics but people who are against string theory does not care when physicists work on those.
It's also the case with common theories like electromagnetism or weak force: we are happy with them because we have observed them, but theoretically (in their current formulation), their parameters are free: if the alpha constant was 10 to the power -100, electromagnetism would have been undetectable up to now (the world would be quite different, but still). And if in this parallel universe a physicist would have came up with the theory and tried to observe it and failed, they could have always said "well, it just means that the alpha constant is even smaller". So, do you agree that electromagnetism is a non falsifiable theory because the alpha constant is a free parameter and could have been arbitrarily small? Because if not, you are saying that exactly the exact same theory is sometimes falsifiable, sometimes unfalsifiable, depending on where the free parameters are: right now string theory is unfalsifiable, but if we observe cosmic superstrings, suddenly, the theory qualifies as falsifiable.
Finally, the more you eliminate part of the landscape, the more the credibility of the theory decreases. And even if some part of landscape remains, the theory is abandoned when it is virtually useless.
String theory necessitates observable objects to remain viable as an useful theory (for example, SUSY particles, specific inflationary signature, ...). If these are not observed, the theory is not 100% rejected, but it becomes "useless": it will prove that the reality needs another fix than the string theory to explain some of the problem we observe in the current standard model. In other term, "string theory" can always remain a possibility, but "string theory as the answer of the current problems" would be 100% rejected and physicists will start working on other theories.
The idea that you pretend that physicists will still work on string theory when all the "juice" would been removed due to constraints is just so surreal to me. The reason string theory is popular amongst physicists is because they want to understand the current problems and that, according to them, string theory is a good candidate to explain them. It is crazy to imagine that when we have demonstrated that string theory cannot explain these problems, people whose main motivation is to explain these problems would say "we know we will not get anything of what we want if we work on this subject, but, hey, it's theoretically not fully excluded, so, I have to continue for eternity before passing to a more promising subject".
We're in too deep to let go of each other now, Cauch. Stalking? No. I'd say, unsolicited following.
On a serious note, I was reflecting the other day and recognize I need to do better with how I address people online. I genuinely apologize for my part in our nasty interaction. It's something I've struggled with, but I will do better.
Too deep? Have you considered seeking help? Our interaction should not be a big deal for balanced people. I had forgotten about it myself and moved on. If you cannot, it shows there is something wrong going on and maybe it should worry you.
As for the unsolicited following, I'm not sure what you would get out of it. I guess you will regularly spew your bile. But it does not really affect me, it just confirms I'm right about what I think of you. The "unsolicited following" perfectly fits the character, it is not really an action that you expect from the "winning side" of the story.
Damn, you really do have issues. Welp, I tried. Seek help my man.
I personally don't care how you respond to my apology; I don't say that defiantly. I just believe that I should own any toxicity I spewed unnecessarily.
But how you respond to someone's genuine apology speaks volumes about how rotten you have become as a person. And I say that in a factual manner; not in any retaliatory way. You are a truly rotten person.
If you have any, I truly feel sorry for your spouse and any children.
Anyways Cauch, best of luck, bud. May your spirit one day be free from the anger and bitterness that oozes from your being.
I think that if you wanted me to be compassionate, you should have avoided to be so creepy. Put yourself in my shoes, I just feel like I'm been accosted by a drunk who want to both become my best bud and shout at me. And because of that, I'm, on purpose, avoiding to give you any compassion or any other excuse to believe I care about you. That's the best strategy with this kind of crazies.
And this is quite creepy: 1. tracking me back, months after we had our discussion, as if it is something you still think about, this is super creepy, 2. saying, even under the cover of humour (cf. next point), that we're "in too deep" or that it is an "unsolicited following", this is creepy, 3. and bringing all that as a "joke", that is just so bizarre, it reminds me of the caricatural obsessive date "oh we should definitively move in together ... just joking ... and decide the name of our future children ... just joking ahahah ..."
So, yeah, just consider that I'm a rotten person if it helps you, or blame others for not showing you the compassion you crave when you admit that you have been shitty with them. You are not relevant to me, I've forgotten about you so fast last time and I can easily block your username if I decide I have better entertainment elsewhere, and I truly don't care about whatever fantasy you invented about me in your strange brain.
I'm not considering that you're a rotten person. I'm telling you that as a matter of fact. You're not able to see it and I understand that. One day you're young and full of life; the next, you're a middle-aged man that is bitter.
I wouldn't expect someone who finds themselves in that state to pick up on it.
You mentioned the caricature that it reminds you of. That is a reflection of something that is taking place inside you and baggage that you bring into an interaction that doesn't merit it. If you can't discern that, that is not something I, or anyone else, can help you with.
You mentioned that I wanted compassion from you. The fact that you're so comfortable making that assumption says a lot about the intellectual integrity you have and the lack of honesty you bring to discussions in your life. Nobody was expecting compassion. However, I emphasize once again and my point remains: how you respond to someone's genuine apology speaks volumes about you.
I know that reflection in the mirror is one you will try to deny and rationalize away, but it's one you should reflect on and, who knows, maybe even use as moment in your life that catapults you into change.
You pointed out, almost in "gotcha" fashion that I admit I have been shitty with people -- I have. 100%. The difference between you and I is not that I have been shitty and you haven't. It's that I still have something inside me that compels to own my shitiness and change. You don't. You're comfortable in your rotteness.
You'll block my username only when the truth of my words hurts too much. Otherwise, being the rotten person you are, you will continue to enjoy the back and forth because you get off on the rage.
Anyways, I'm about to go workout and enjoy my day. I am releasing you Cauch!
I'm still not sure what you imagine this conversation will do. What do you think will happen? You know I think you are ridiculous and pathetic, already from the previous conversation. And you're coming back after months to do this strange little dance, it just looks so unhinged. Do you really think this whole conversation will change that, and not in fact reconfirming that my first impression was correct?
I feel that you are trying to convince me that you are very wise by doing more and more unhinged things. I'm not sure why you think this would even work.
As I've said, I'm 100% fine to know that you think I'm rotten. You already insulted me previously, I got the message and I can't care less, so why come back to do it again? Why would you think I will take you seriously now? Are you "trying to save me from myself"? That's not really convincing: coming back to a stranger on the internet after few months for pure altruism, that is not something that a sane person would do (especially as you were pretending that you did not care at all). Instead of "trying to save me from myself", the readers will suspect that you came back because you still have things on your chest, and that this conversation is more for you than for me. That's sad.
The "untestable" meme is just a thought terminating cliche. It's as if you believe no researchers ever considered the brilliant insight that the framework is difficult to test. History is littered with plenty of examples of a novel discovery, understanding, or technology yielding new opportunities for experimental design.
It's also a glib dismissal of the unexpected mathematical elegance of string theory that makes it so compelling. Worse, it completely ignores the material contributions to applied physics that string theory has made possible which is obviously worth "spending your life's work on" - as if people need to justify the value of their life's work to disinterested onlookers lest they be demeaned.
People go whole lives without being able to make it pan out.