String theory becoming a religion

As I said, the main problem of the field of theoretical physics is lack of convincing criteria of quality.

In my opinion, a useful criterium would be mathematical nontriviality of the work.

But in practice, the focus is typically on relevance to string theory.

I don’t like this, even being a string theorist myself. It is not certain that string theory is more relevant to physics than any other mathematics.

Many young people wasted years of their life doing hard calculations only because they seem relevant for string theory. I think this is wrong. The criterium for choosing a problem to work on, should be:

How much of interesting mathematical structure will you discover, by doing this work?

Relevance to a particular paradigm (such as superstring theory) should be secondary.