Tao is talking about academic publishing, based around learning for it's own sake. If no learning happened, do not publish. From a different angle, what we do

Tao is talking about academic publishing, based around learning for it's own sake. If no learning happened, do not publish. From a different angle, what we don't understand can absolutely hurt us and you're right too, but it doesn't contradict Tao's viewpoint. Edit: if you had a PoC cracking the encryption, I think the result is still publishable due to impact and the fact of the empirical result. That's different from some esoteric proof that nobody is even sure it's right.