I wrote one (experimental) bogus paper. He wrote quite a few papers, I'm not sure if any of them used the experimental non-technique that was common at the time.

So there is a theory based on the renormalization group that can explain many (but not all) "fractal" phenomena that are observed.

I was part of the false paradigm of "bin up a probability distribution", "plot it up on log-log paper", and "draw a straight line."

Sometimes when you do that you will get an answer that has something to do with reality but it is not a valid answer to the problems of: "is a power law distribution a good model of this phenomenon", "what is a good estimate of the exponent", "are these two power law charts drawn from the same distribution" not to mention how to handle the problems that turn up at the highly frequent and highly rare ends of the distribution.

The root cause is this attitude

http://thinkexist.com/quotation/if_your_experiment_needs_sta...

and an academic system where power is too concentrated, where people who write review articles do the most good but get the least career advancement, etc.

I read the comment as saying that the postdoc kept his reservations about power law distributions to himself until after he had tenure, so as to not upset the applecart I suppose... ?

I read the comment as implying that the colleague had published a paper on power law distributions in order to publish (pressure) while the poster knew that the colleague did not believe in the subject.