Despite the recent interest surge in the topic of pursuitworthiness within philosophy of science, Philip Kitcher's claim that science is, by its very nature, a significant pursuit has yet to be challenged within the literature. I argue in favor of the relevance of the category of worthless science, by establishing that it is irreducible to non-pursuitworthiness in the standard sense. I introduce a distinction between the internal epistemic aims constitutive of a research program and its external (or collateral) aims, those objectives satisfiable across disciplinary boundaries as a byproduct of internal inquiry. I then propose three jointly sufficient desiderata for worthless scientific pursuits: small research community size, minimal goal-set overlap with other scientific communities, and relative absence of achievable external aims, and formalize them within a utilitarian expected-utility framework. I subsequently address the principal challenge to this account raised by the Feyerabendian equivalence principle of pursuits, as recently discussed by Shaw, arguing that it collapses prescriptively into absurdity. I then identify two paradigmatic instantiations of worthless science: self-referential classificatory inquiry and speculative exploratory modeling, providing some case studies. I conclude by examining institutional mechanisms, as offsetting arrangements and better-structured interdisciplinary collaboration, capable of minimizing worthless pursuits without foreclosing epistemic pluralism.
