>>11172606good read. except i call bullshit on average string theory phd's being able to pick up any paper in the field of string theory and being able to understand them easily. i've sat in journal clubs where postdocs get totally schooled on papers by more senior guys, even when it is right in their exact subfield subspecialty. and that doesn't even cover how varied the field is now -- there are lots of very specific and highly developed subspecialties in string theory so i get the impression most newly minted PhD's in string theory are only really conversant in a very small fraction of what the literature covers and would only be able to understand something like a quarter of papers even if they tried really hard (without talking to a colleague who specializes in whatever disjoint subspecialty)
in other words I would be even more harsh than that guy because most string theory phd's don't even get exposed to most of the field of string and get churned out having only acquired a very tunnel-vision uber-specialized knowledge
i think this is a partial reason for why string theory used to have revolutions every 10 years or so, and young theorists could make a splash with big results (think Witten or Seiberg or Maldacena) but there hasn't been anything close to the revolutions like the schwarz-scherck stuff or anomaly cancellation or M theory or AdS/CFT revolutions for 22 years now. and no, conformal bootstrap is nowhere near those
