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What are bad recommendations you hear in your profession or area of expertise?

On the record

Public figures who have answered a question like this elsewhere. Quoted from the source shown, not written for FLAPSS.

Richard Feynman Theoretical physicist; Nobel laureate in Physics, 1965
For example, I was a little surprised when I was talking to a friend who was going to go on the radio. He does work on cosmology and astronomy, and he wondered how he would explain what the applications of this work were. "Well," I said, "there aren't any." He said, "Yes, but then we won't get support for more research of this kind." I think that's kind of dishonest. If you're representing yourself as a scientist, then you should explain to the layman what you're doing—and if they don't want to support you under those circumstances, then that's their decision.

Recorded Caltech commencement address, Pasadena, California, Caltech Engineering and Science (Caltech Library archive), 1 June 1974 source ↗

Elinor Ostrom Political economist; laureate of the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences, 2009
Yes, but not with a formula. So there are many, many efforts now to decentralize and they create a rigid formula and give people rules from on top and say, 'Now it's yours.' And that isn't worked very well either. … And, you think about the variety. If you look at a countryside, think of the variety out there in terms of the ecological variety. Well, if people are going to manage ecological variety, no single set of rules will work in a semi-arid versus a tropical-wet region. They have to be different.

Recorded Adam Smith, Telephone interview recorded immediately after the prize announcement, Nobel Prize Outreach, 12 October 2009 source ↗

Terence Tao Mathematician; Fields Medallist, 2006
AI without validation is too unreliable to be of use in any serious application.

Recorded Quanta Magazine reporter, Reported interview, Quanta Magazine, 13 April 2026 source ↗

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