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__Emil__ comments on Which Fields Are Underserved? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Apologies in advance for nitpicking, but the heuristic is to ask what are the real-world consequences of propositions in this discipline being right or wrong, not whether the discipline has real-world consequences. So what are the propositions of mathematics that can be right or wrong? Clearly a published theorem can be right or wrong, but most are correct. What can be right or wrong is what areas of pure mathematics people consider to be interesting. I would say that these propositions can be right or wrong, and do have "real world" consequences. People used to think graph theory was not interesting - they were wrong.
I'm not sure interestingness is really the focus of the issue. I'm sure feminist post-structuralist discourse analyses of the recent banking crisis are very interesting to people interested in the subject, but I still don't think it has any power to deduce true facts about the universe.
I do have another heuristic which is a little less straightforward to apply, but a little more selective: would a society of humans kept isolated from our own for thousands of years develop a similar discipline with the same essential elements as our version? Pure maths definitely passes that one, while something like Jungian analysis probably wouldn't.