Comment by godelski

  > They don’t quibble about a 10x speed up, they reduce the “big O()” complexity. They could care less whether it was implemented in interpreted Python or hand-optimized assembly code.

I can at least say that's not all of us. But you're probably right that this is dominating. I find it so weird since everyone stresses empirics yet also seems to not care about them. It took me my entire PhD to figure out what was really going on. I've written too many long winded rants on this site though