Comment by toss1

The criticism may depend on different values of "making it up as you go along", i.e., it may not mean so much "just wing it in ignorance" vs something like "even if you have many answers you don't yet have all of them, and new answers generate new questions exponentially...". So, perhaps less "everyone's ignorant" vs "we're all living in a land of many unknowns". But, yeah, he did find it disillusioning, and maybe is over-generalizing from a one-off experience (in contrast, I've done similar and was nothing but impressed, finding it is extremely valuable to learn from the best in a field).

How do you distinguish between what you do and "making it up as you go along"?