I agree with everything you wrote and you said it better than I was going to. I just want to add that I actually see "lapsed physicist" as a good sign: in physi

I agree with everything you wrote and you said it better than I was going to. I just want to add that I actually see "lapsed physicist" as a good sign: in physics PHD grads, we have a lot of people who as part of their formation undertook a focused study on some area at the forefront of human knowledge. Only by doing a lot of these studies will be make real advances, because science is mostly finding things that dont work. And the byproduct is someone with "useful" skills in the sense that they can use them to easily transition to highly paid work, or what the author calls a lapse. Less often, one goes on to a research career, and less often still, one makes a big breakthrough. But overall, it's win-win. Not saying its perfect, but I think having a meaningful offramp after grad school is the best way to do more exploration and push the frontier of science. If you had to do a PHD and then risk complete unemployability after, the situation would be much worse