Comment by peterkos

I'm imagining a spectrum between "has to be slow" and "needlessly slow", with a middle slider for that one razor where things take as much time as you give them.

Intentionality is a big theme in math research (so i've heard), where solving "useful" problems isn't the ideal goal. The goal is to solve interesting problems, which might seem useless, but along the way achieve results with much wider implications that would have been impossible to discover directly. Or, how inventions like toothpaste came from space travel research.

(rhetorically) Does an indirect result "justify" a longer, slower project? Is speed an inherent property of the problem, or is it only knowable once it's complete? Or both, in the cases of misused funds?