It's very hard to remind yourself every day that someone has to investigate what turn out to be dead ends
It's a very interesting point you raise here, Bean. I got into a very long protracted argument on the net once with a person who maintained (among inumerable other nonsense) that all falsehoods were lies and all lies were bad.
There's an interesting bit in Popper's "Objective Knowledge" though where he says that there's a real danger in rejecting false theories too soon - before we've gleaned everything we can from them.
I was involved a few years ago on the periphery of a very intruiging project. The other teams were doing real research, but my boss insisted that I get around all that research by getting right to some valuable insight. I tried to tell him that it doesn't work like that. I'm a big believer in serendipity, but that comes about when people are immersed in something - making mistakes and learning from them. Getting right to the point without getting immersed in the subject and making bad guesses, etc., is a crazy goal. I tried to explain that he was asking me to get insight prior to experience, but it fell on deaf ears.
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