I’m not super happy with my phrasing, and Ben’s “glory” mentioned in a reply indeed seems to capture it better.
The point you make about theoretical research agrees with what I’m pointing at—whether you perceive a problem as interesting or not is often related to the social context and potential payoff. What I’m specifically suggesting that if you took this factor out of ML, it wouldn’t be much more interesting than many other fields with a similar balance of empirical and theoretical components.
I’m not super happy with my phrasing, and Ben’s “glory” mentioned in a reply indeed seems to capture it better.
The point you make about theoretical research agrees with what I’m pointing at—whether you perceive a problem as interesting or not is often related to the social context and potential payoff.
What I’m specifically suggesting that if you took this factor out of ML, it wouldn’t be much more interesting than many other fields with a similar balance of empirical and theoretical components.