Advisors who always insist on one particular idea: How to deal with this? My advisor has developed an idea earlier in his career. While this idea is not particularly bad, he always tries to force all his students to apply it to almost all research topics we encounter. Many of them are, in my opinion, obviously not suitable to apply this idea onto, and have resulted in no research output, but he still insists on making the application of this idea work. This takes away our time to try more sound ideas and makes us work much less efficiently. What should I (and other students) do to stop this?
One suggestion is to use a kind of "red herring" strategy: Work on two directions in parallel.

The one direction is the idea that your supervisor wants you to follow, and that you will mainly discuss in meetings, thus giving him the impression that you buy into his game.

The other direction is the idea that you think will actually lead to results. The time to first mention this direction is when you have made some substantial results - you may then calmly announce that you plan to submit them to a specific publication venue.