It’s a preparadigmatic field. Nobody is going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that X fails, for exactly the same reasons that nobody is going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that X works. And that just doesn’t matter very much, for decision-making purposes. If something looks unlikely to work, then the EV-maximizing move is to dismiss it and move on. Maybe one or two people work on the thing-which-is-unlikely-to-work in order to decorrelate their bets with everyone else, but mostly people should ignore things which are unlikely to work, especially if there’s already one or two people looking closer at it.
It’s a preparadigmatic field. Nobody is going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that X fails, for exactly the same reasons that nobody is going to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that X works. And that just doesn’t matter very much, for decision-making purposes. If something looks unlikely to work, then the EV-maximizing move is to dismiss it and move on. Maybe one or two people work on the thing-which-is-unlikely-to-work in order to decorrelate their bets with everyone else, but mostly people should ignore things which are unlikely to work, especially if there’s already one or two people looking closer at it.