[kagakuninja]

I am not a physicist, but what I have read from critics (badly paraphrased):

During the hype phase of string theory, every major university wanted to get in on the game, and devoted large amounts of funding towards hiring researchers with a background in string theory. If you weren't one of those people, you were at a severe disadvantage, and might not get hired at all.

String theory hovered up tons of cash in university budgets, and majorly fucked over a lot of careers. The result of all this money has been no actual scientifically proven results despite decades of research.

[consilient]

> devoted large amounts of funding towards hiring researchers with a background in string theory. If you weren't one of those people, you were at a severe disadvantage, and might not get hired at all.

> String theory hovered up tons of cash in university budgets, and majorly fucked over a lot of careers.

This is pretty misleading. An argument could be made - though I'm not necessarily endorsing it - that string theory has crowded out other quantum gravity research programs in the last few decades. But quantum gravity is a small and poorly funded subfield: we're talking about no more than a few hundred people total in the US, fighting over one medium-sized experiment worth of grant money. None of it makes any difference to the overwhelming majority of physicists.

[senttoschool]

If there was a more promising theory to investigate in, we would have done that, right?

Even today, we don't really have anything much better than string theory.