Suppose you build an intellectual enterprise on a mistake. You take one style of data accumulation to achieve verisimilar results, but it it does not. What then? If your practicing that enterprise has not been otiose, then something of worth might have been achieved through the process. If it has, then the activity has been pernicious. Not simply to you, but to those dealt the blows of your pragmatic indolence.

You could have been erecting buildings on the streets of Barcelona.