Tales of rebellion against externally-opaque meritocracies

A basic problem in metascience / intellectual progress is that it’s hard to tell, from the outside, whether a group that you disagree with is: “A self-dealing cabal enmeshed in groupthink”, versus “An externally-opaque meritocracy”, i.e. a bunch of smart people figuring things out in a meritocratic way, and sorry but you’re just not smart enough and truth-seeking enough to recognize that this group is right about everything while you’re wrong. You just can’t tell those apart from the outside—i.e. without having the time and skill to dive into the object-level debates and come out with the right answer. And most people don’t have that kind of time and skill. …Unless the group can produce easily-verifiable artifacts that any moron can recognize to be proof that they’re correct on the specific question at issue. (“So that's all that Science really asks of you—the ability to accept reality when you're beat over the head with it.”) …And sometimes there is no such artifact to be found! In those cases, even if the second bullet point is what’s really going on, the group is vulnerable to outside agitators accusing them of being the first bullet point, and running them out of town. Here are two historical anecdotes, which I personally think exemplify this dynamic. But other people will say “No, one or both of those is actually the first bullet point!!” And I probably won’t be able to convince them that they’re wrong. Ironic! But that’s exactly the point! (1) The breaching of the string theory consensus in the 2000s.[1] “The Standard Model of Particle Physics including weak-field quantum general relativity (GR)” (I wish it were better-known and had a catchier name) appears sufficient to explain everything that happens in the solar system (ref). Nobody has ever found any experiment violating it, despite extraordinarily precise and varied tests. This theory can’t explain everything that happens in the universe—in particular, it can’t make any predictions about either (i) microscopic exploding black holes or (ii) the Big Bang. Also, (iii) the Standard Model happens to include 18 elementary particles (depending on how you count), because those are the ones we’ve discovered; but the theoretical framework is fully compatible with other particles existing too, and indeed there are strong theoretical and astronomical reasons to think they do exist. It’s just that those other particles are irrelevant for anything happening on Earth—so irrelevant that we’ve spent decades and billions of dollars searching for any Earthly experiment whatsoever where they play a measurable role, without success. Anyway, I think there are strong reasons to believe that our universe follows some set of orderly laws—some well-defined mathematical framework that elegantly unifies the Standard Model with all of GR, not just weak-field GR—even if physicists don’t know what those laws are yet. So it would be cool to find those orderly laws. This is the goal of fundamental physics theory research.[2] Now, the extraordinary success of “The Standard Model of Particle Physics including weak-field quantum GR” is a double-edged sword. It’s good because it seems like we can already correctly predict the results of every fundamental-physics lab experiment that we’ve ever done or know how to do, which is very cool! It’s bad because we know that we don’t yet have the last word on how the universe works, but if we want to go further, and find those orderly laws mentioned above, we probably won’t be able to show off any experimental proof that we’re on the right track. Every experimental result is already covered! There’s nothing left! So that’s the background context. Now in the 1980s–2000s, theoretical fundamental physicists investigated string theory with growing interest. They found that string theory had the intriguing property that, if a universe was governed by this kind of theory, (1) it would exactly satisfy GR (not just weak-field GR), always and everywhere, and (2) in the limit where our universe has the Standard Model of Particle Physics, a string theory universe would … well, it wouldn’t necessarily be exactly the Standard Model of Particle Physics, but at least it would be that kind of a thing, namely a “Quantum Field Theory”. And, (3) it would be well-defined everywhere, offering answers (in principle) even to questions about microscopic exploding black holes and so on, questions on which existing physics theory would return “[error: invalid input]”. None of that proves that our universe is governed by something like string theory, of course. But it sure suggests that it’s a promising research direction. So by the 2000s, the theoretical fundamental physics departments were full of string theory experts, judging the promise of each other’s string-theory papers along metrics that outsiders could not understand. Alas, this area of math / physics remains very hard, with many open questions, so as of today we still have neither a specific string theory