On another note, since the article sings the praises of "hard sciences", we should be aware that there is in fact a similar tendency at work in certain highly theoretical fields of scientific academia. For example, this video makes a pretty compelling case that most of modern particle physics is dominated by highly unscientific speculation that has tried (and repeatedly, embarrassingly failed) to solve "problems" with the Standard Model that aren't actual problems. The video is well worth a watch (the author is herself a fairly respected theoretical physicist, to be clear, so her critiques come from a place of intimate knowledge):
The great irony here is that it seems like what particle physicists are doing is basically philosophy. They reject the standard model, not because it makes incorrect predictions, but because it's not "elegant" enough - in other words, it's not as meaningful as we'd like it to be. It makes a bunch of weird esoteric claims and these claims seem to work perfectly at predicting anything we can measure, but we as human beings don't really know what to make of them. So, physicists search for hidden meaning that will make the standard model intuitive. But of course that's not something science can tell us: all science can do is make predictions and test them.
I showed this video to a physics grad student and she disagreed with the premise (that these ideas were fanciful and we can say in hindsight they never should have been tried). I guess this is similar to the "waste of time" question actually. Testing particle physics hypotheses is expensive. Falsifying a hypothesis might not be a waste of money, but if you could have simply pruned the idea before it was ever seen as valid enough to test (taking care not to suppress the true new theories), but failed to do so, then sure, the experiment was a waste. So Sabine Hossenfelder seems to have a similar problem with science as one mentioned in
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, in which Robert Pirsig became disillusioned as a biochemistry undergrad with the ease of generating arbitrary hypotheses... Arguably he ruined his chance at a hard science career with his philosophy!
