Let's say you have a pool of smart first year grad students you want to inspire to work hard on problems for you for the next 7 years.
Do you say "we're going to give you a problem that is unsolved but likely has a general solution, and you have a chance of making progress, publishing, and moving on to a postdoc" or do you say "THis is an impossibly hard problem and you will only make a marginal improvement on the state of the art because the problem space is so complex and large"?
You say the first because it gets the students interested and working on the problem, only to learn many years later that the simplified model presented was so simplified it wasn't helpful. I fell for that and spent years working on drug discovery, structure prediction, etc, only to realize: while what Anfinsen said was true, it only applies to about 1% of protein space. It's not so much a "no true scotsman" as "some scotsmen wear quilts, and others have beards, but neither of those is sufficient to classify an example as scots".
Do you say "we're going to give you a problem that is unsolved but likely has a general solution, and you have a chance of making progress, publishing, and moving on to a postdoc" or do you say "THis is an impossibly hard problem and you will only make a marginal improvement on the state of the art because the problem space is so complex and large"?
You say the first because it gets the students interested and working on the problem, only to learn many years later that the simplified model presented was so simplified it wasn't helpful. I fell for that and spent years working on drug discovery, structure prediction, etc, only to realize: while what Anfinsen said was true, it only applies to about 1% of protein space. It's not so much a "no true scotsman" as "some scotsmen wear quilts, and others have beards, but neither of those is sufficient to classify an example as scots".