alt Hacker NewsAll good points, but remember the claim in question was:
> But if we pay enough of these people to sit in rooms and work on problems, maybe one of them will figure something out.
and the response that you called "very reasonable" was:
> There’s more than enough already. (And, historically, you only need less than a dozen.)
So you were agreeing with someone who said we are paying too many physicists. There are too many people studying this problem. Okay, let's get rid of some then. Which ones?
> I'm also very much not saying that who will contribute what is in any way predictable
Uh oh, then how do we know who to get rid of? Which physicists should we not be paying? The claim that we should fire a bunch of scientists because we "only need less than a dozen" is nonsense, and you called this claim "very reasonable", with more examples. But maybe I should have replied to that person instead. It's a little awkward trying to have an N-way conversation when you can only reply to one response at a time.
The statement that there's more than enough, is not the statement that we should be firing them. It's a statement that we don't want more.
But if we had to fire some, I'd recommend ones who are not willing to do research outside of oversubscribed ideas. That's because the lack of success of existing lines of research means that additional effort there is less likely to work out than looking at less overpopulated approaches.