I disagree. Consider the following two sources of evidence that information theory will be broadly useful:
Information theory is elegant.
There is some domain of application in which information theory is useful.
I think that (2) is stronger evidence than (1). If some framework is elegant but has not been applied downstream in any domain after a reasonable amount of time, then I don’t think its elegance is strong reason to nevertheless believe that the framework will later find a domain of application.
I think there’s some threshold number of downstream applications X such that once a framework has Xdownstream applications, discovering the (X+1)st application is weaker evidence of broad usefulness than elegance. But very likely, X≥1. Consider e.g. that there are many very elegant mathematical structures that aren’t useful for anything.
I disagree. Consider the following two sources of evidence that information theory will be broadly useful:
Information theory is elegant.
There is some domain of application in which information theory is useful.
I think that (2) is stronger evidence than (1). If some framework is elegant but has not been applied downstream in any domain after a reasonable amount of time, then I don’t think its elegance is strong reason to nevertheless believe that the framework will later find a domain of application.
I think there’s some threshold number of downstream applications X such that once a framework has Xdownstream applications, discovering the (X+1)st application is weaker evidence of broad usefulness than elegance. But very likely, X≥1. Consider e.g. that there are many very elegant mathematical structures that aren’t useful for anything.