There are people like Sabine Hossenfelder who think that there are experiments we could run that we currently don't run, because they don't fit into the string physics paradigm. 

If you look back through history, in most times you would not see data that shows that a specific non-hegemonic scientific paradigm is better than the hegemonic paradigm. We usually only have clear data that a different paradigm is better when the old paradigm stops being hegemonic. 

The idea that progress is stalled because everyone is hypnotized by string theory, I think is simply false, and I say that despite having studied alternative theories of physics, much much more than the typical person who knows some string theory.

Are you saying that progress in physics hasn't stalled or that string theory isn't to blame?

The paper you linked about the last big breakthrough seems to be from 1997, so roughly 28 years ago. What do you consider to be the biggest breakthrough since then?

In many cases, new paradigms care about different metrics than older paradigms. In the beginning, successful new paradigms usually don't fulfill the qualities that heterodox researchers in the field are looking to. You might want to read Thomas Khun's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions".

There are ways you can make it easier to overturn paradigms. You can change the way research is funded. You could change the grant-making processes in a way that makes it easier for very smart young people to pursue research agendas that heterodox old people don't find interesting. 

There's the Max Planck quote of "Science advances one funeral at a time". In the last decades, old researchers got more power over which research gets conducted than back in 1950 when Planck wrote his autobiography. 

I think the problem is that you ignore the idea that science works via paradigms. Even if there's a possible paradigm besides string theory that would produce more progress, there are a lot of different things that people who aren't working on string theory could work on. Most of them won't lead anywhere.

If a new paradigm could be found that has more potential, that paradigm would have new low hanging fruit. 

However, researchers that would write papers about that low hanging fruit, might have trouble getting published in journals of the old paradigm because they are solving problems of interest to the new paradigm and not problems of interest of the old paradigm. Getting funding to work on problems of a new paradigm is also harder. 

It's worth noting that we observe other forms of simplication of language as well. English reduced the amount of inflections of verbs. The distinction between singular and plural pronouns disappeared. 

In many cases, there are diminishing returns to a given scientific paradigm. The fact that you observe a field getting diminishing returns doesn't mean that there isn't a paradigm that the field could adopt that would allow for returns to flow again. Paradigm change is about pursuing ideas that people in the old paradigm don't find promising.

Just adding more smart people who follow a hegemonic paradigm doesn't automatically get you paradigm shifts that unlock new returns. If string theory stiffles progress, it would look from the inside like there are diminishing returns to theoretical physics.

There seems to be papers that show that if you naively train on chain of thought, you train models not to verbalize potentially problematic reasoning in their chain of thought. I however don't see discussion about how to train chain of thought models to better verbalize their reasoning. 

If you can easily train a model to hide it's reasoning you should also be able to train models the other way around to be more explicit about their reasoning. 

One approach I imagine is to take a query like diagnosing medical issues and replace key words that change the output and then see how well the chain of thought reflects that change. If the chain of thought tells you something about the change in outcome, you reinforce the chain of thought. If the chain of thought doesn't reflect the outcome well, you punish the chain of thought.

All it takes is trusting that people believe what they say over and over for decades across all of society, and getting all your evidence about reality filtered through those same people.

I seems to me like you also need to have no desire to figure things out on your own. A lot of rationalists have experiences of seeking truth and finding out that certain beliefs people around them hold aren't true. Rationalists who grow up in communities where many people believe in God frequently deconvert because they see enough signs that the beliefs of those people around them aren't really fitting together. 

Given that most people living in religious communities grow up believing in God just as the people around them do, it's might be very normal to think that way, but it still feels really strange to me and probably does feel strange to many other rationalists as well. 

What do you mean with 'must'? The word has to different meanings in this context and it seems bad epistemology not to distinguish them.