As to your first point, my answer is no. What I mean by “good research” is just research that meets general normative scientific criteria for knowledge, I guess we assume that such criteria tends towards truth. I guess in the back of my mind I’m supposing that true statements are more useful than false ones.
As to your second point, I think it is based on the misunderstanding in your first point. Or else, I’ve misunderstood your second point. :) But I think my first proposition needs some work. For instance, you could imagine a continuum between good research and bad research, and a continuum between useful research and non-useful research. In this case, it wasn’t my intent to really specify how much usefulness average quality research has, but only that bad research has very little utility. The difference in utility between good and average research I really don’t know.
Also, this is my second post on the site, so hopefully I’m meeting the standards for posting here. If not, I’ll just lurk more. I also don’t know how much certainty do you guys expect when someone makes a proposition here.
I think good research is useful, and bad research is non-useful. Research that the researcher doesn’t find interesting is unlikely to be good. Therefore, it is unlikely that research that the researcher doesn’t find interesting is going to be useful.
I don’t think that interesting research is likely to be useful because researchers are more likely to be interested in useful things. Most of what mathematicians study, for instance, has little obvious practical value.