The lesson I draw from this is that you should be sensitive to the distinction between "discredited" and "making progress on a longer time scale than you can re

The lesson I draw from this is that you should be sensitive to the distinction between "discredited" and "making progress on a longer time scale than you can recognize". You can discredit any technology -- or overestimate it, for that matter -- by analyzing it on a short enough time scale, just as you can take a random walk and interpret it as a series of dramatic surges and crashes.