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And it is. It depends on the timing.
Mapping and characterizing sunspots is pretty useless. Now. Not even always, but I'll cede the point.
But if it's 1650 CE or even 1850 CE, maybe mapping and characterizing sunspots and their patterns is not so useless.
Let's say you're a Fabricius. It's 1611, January. You're writing your report of novel observations. Maybe they're not novel, but your lit search didn't turn anything up. If you produce a theory and then tailor the set of facts to support your theory, the argument is over theory and nobody can really improve on it. Yeah, your facts support heliocentrism, but the theory could go either way given your facts. One big fact, generalized over a small set of little facts, doesn't make a theory, and you don't have enough to produce one. Nonetheless, the observations are useful: They are new facts. Perhaps you realize that your facts subvert your working theory. The alternative to publication is to sit on your facts until you have a proven, workable theory.
Even if you don't have more facts, a theory or even a hypothesis, what you do have may attract attention and that will produce new facts; perhaps 30 people will have 30 theories because of your set of facts, and all 30 will be wrong, but facts, useful only when their packaging is discarded, are useful.
In new fields, or fields so complex that theories are little more than heuristic mechanisms, sometimes, "Gee, isn't that interesting?" is the best science, and any theory that accompanies it is likely to be trite--useful in the lab, not so useful in the grand scheme of things. In other fields (mine, for instance), you often read articles that introduce a new fact. The fact is important; the less an experienced researcher knows to do with it, the more important the fact. But often a less-experienced researcher will go into a long-winded and utterly obvious explanation of how it fits into a specific theory (as though that were especially meaningful if it fits into 10 theories), or introduce a minor yet obvious tweak to make the theory accommodate the fact (thus doing nothing but showing how powerful and expansive, and therefore useless, the theory is). Yet what's useful is 10 years later when all the facts pile up and somebody makes a set of them and says, "Hey--did anybody notice this pattern before?" A metafact. Then somebody takes 20 "metafacts" and says, "Maybe it all works like this. Hmm...maybe not. But if it does, then...". A lot of 20-year-old journals 200 pages long could profitably be reissued in 20-page supplements of just the facts. Except that since they thought theory was so important when you pull out the facts you have gaping holes in the datasets that you just *know* the experimenter had data for but which wasn't relevant to the all-important theory. To save two pages they left out the data that gave context to their important facts, yet took 20 to explicate what boiled down to refined crap. (And the more obvious it is now that the theory was bass-ackward the harder it is to wring the original data out of the researcher.)
Frustrating, that. Yeah, give me the working hypotheses and make sure you don't confuse them with actual understanding and Truth. But first, give me the facts as they appear, with context to keep them from spinning out of control.
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