The EA recommendation I tend to see for physicists is to not do physics.
I’ve been understanding this to mean that under the current institutional paradigm, more physics research on the margin probably isn’t very helpful.
Achieving a fundamental breakthrough seems obviously great (though hard to do in the current paradigm), and meaningfully reforming the current paradigm would probably be very high-value as well (though tricky to do).
Previously, physics foundations theorists were disciplined by a strong norm of respecting the theories that best fit the data. But with less data, theorists have turned to mainly judging proposed theories via various standards of “beauty” which advocates claim to have inferred from past patterns of success with data. Except that these standards (and their inferences) are mostly informal, change over time, differ greatly between individuals and schools of thought, and tend to label as “ugly” our actual best theories so far.
I’ve been understanding this to mean that under the current institutional paradigm, more physics research on the margin probably isn’t very helpful.
Achieving a fundamental breakthrough seems obviously great (though hard to do in the current paradigm), and meaningfully reforming the current paradigm would probably be very high-value as well (though tricky to do).
Robin Hanson has more to say on this (a):
See also “What does any of this have to do with physics?” (a).