I think this is a basic tenant of research - you can't always expect a specific outcome, sometimes you just have to explore curiosity and see what turns up.

However the contrarian in me wants to call out a counter-point:

> Working on unimportant problems can create important side-effects.

If over-applied - this logic can essentially become the tech-investor equivalent of trickle-down economics.

Who is to say that those areas that benefited from the side-effects of other work wouldn't have benefitted even more from direct investment?