[orange3xchicken]

Yikes! This doesn't really come across as a nice comment (bent minds???). There are good concrete reasons to pursue a PhD (ignoring soft reasons like pure interest): wanting a research career is one - it's pretty difficult to get hired as a scientist without a PhD. Also, historical evidence doesn't really support your claim that R&D is orthogonal to business value. Sure, pure science is often independent from $$$ (despite plenty of examples of producing real value), but applied R&D is oftentimes parallel to value generation. if R&D in general is useless, why do top tech companies spend big money on research groups?

Getting a PhD is a fine deal if you have good reasons.

[realtalk_sp]

I explicitly caveated my statement with "Using a PhD as a gateway into applied ML" for a reason. The vast majority of people going into applied ML are not pioneering new methods. They're using ML as a tool to support business objectives. This is the group I'm talking about.

The phrase "bent of mind" roughly implies "the way someone thinks". Its usage is declining I suppose but there's nothing connotatively nefarious there.

[orange3xchicken]

Yeah - I looked it up. Thanks!

[nsriv]

Bent of mind is a phrase that means proclivity or predisposition, and PhDs are famously arduous.