The Cursed Word "Interesting"

People calling ideas “interesting” was perhaps the greatest challenge I regularly faced in communicating about research.

This wouldn’t matter so much if coming up with good ideas wasn’t arguably the most important part of research itself.

Here’s how it goes. You’re talking to someone about research ideas, and they say “I find X interesting” or “X would be interesting.” They almost certainly mean that they think X has never been done before. They might be claiming that their new idea X is:

• just something they cooked up, it may not even be worth pursuing research-wise
• a fun application of an existing idea
• a fun application with a fundamentally new idea
• an incremental tweak
• a clever idea (i.e., an incremental tweak people will like)
• a potential component of a research paper
• a potential entire research paper
• a potential research redirection
• a total moonshot project
• research-adjacent, but not paper-driven; a more fundamental issue that they like to think about and discuss

(The above ordered from least to most dramatic.)

This challenge is exacerbated if you’re talking with people who aren’t actively publishing, or who are publishing-adjacent. If you’re in the research world, you’re hungry to publish, so all ideas pass through this “is it novel enough for a research paper” filter. If you’re not, your novelty or excitement filters aren’t calibrated the same way. Plus, before you’re a bit seasoned, most research ideas you have are incremental, hacks, boring, too out-there, dead ends, or repetitions of old patterns from five or forty years ago.

Back to the conversation. You might reply, “Interesting!” and mean one of:

• I’m not paying attention and maybe want to leave the conversation.
• I don’t actually understand what you’re saying.
• I get the gist, but you didn’t use any examples / talked too fast / I haven’t thought about the problem enough, so I need time to process.
• I think you’re proposing category Y (above), but I think it’s actually a lower category Z (above), or it’s been done before.
  • Most common scenario here: I think that you are claiming this is a novel idea worthy of a research paper, but it’s actually almost the same thing as Foo et al. (2019), so I don’t think it’s worth pursuing.
• I think you’re proposing category Y (above) and I agree.
• I think you’re proposing category Y (above), but I actually think it could be upgraded to a higher category (Z) above.
  • This one is really fun and one of the best parts of research conversations.

Because people publish so much, the scenario of “that actually exists, see Foo et al. (2019)” is super common. But, it is socially exhausting to keep telling someone that—you seem like an annoying know-it-all. And if you don’t know them well, or you aren’t sure what category they’re aiming for, it might not feel worth it.

Even worse, if the idea is fun and novel and exciting to them, what kind of monster could tell them that it’s stupid, incremental, a dead-end, and oh by the way has been done before by fourteen papers?⁰¹

This leads to a common failure mode, which is people just talking past each other saying the word “interesting.” The idea-giver hasn’t made clear what category they think the idea is, and the idea-receiver isn’t able to disambiguate and respond in a non-annoying way.

As usual with research, you might not even realize this is all going on for a couple years. Once you do, you might be tempted to start replying with:

“Actually, you said ‘interesting,’ but really it’s a boring idea—we could spend six months doing that and nobody would even yawn at it.”

But, of course, you can’t go around doing that. (Plus, you might be wrong.) So we end up in a weird Nash equilibrium of people going around saying “interesting” to each other and nobody quite knowing what’s going on.⁰²

Success here is fascinating to observe.

Find really effective communicators, usually people who fit the criteria of (a) professors, (b) people like their research, (c) people like them personally. (Not all three are required, but each is a strong signal boost.) Listen to them have a conversation where a junior researcher is learning to talk about research. Watching the junior researcher feels like watching someone try to wobble down the road on their first bicycle, fresh off of training wheels.

What the effective person does is:

• Model where the junior person is coming from — what category of “interesting” are they proposing the idea is?
• Then, validate the way that they found the idea interesting. This can be quick, and is more common if the effective communicator has higher emotional intelligence. If the next step is carried out well, it’s actually optional.
• Mold the proposed idea—which is probably bad—into a direction worth pursuing. This might be the nugget of a research paper, or maybe a research direction. Here comes the wild part: this molding will ideally have two additional characteristics:
  1. It will fit in the effective communicator’s research agenda.
  2. They will make it seem like the junior person had the idea in the first place.

If you’re following so far, this feat of accomplishment is totally wild.

Once I understood this was happening, I spent years trying to replicate it. But trying to do this by imitation is almost impossible, like trying to ride a bike based on imitating someone’s movements. I eventually realized that most profs are using a much simpler heuristic to achieve results almost the same as the above:

1. Don’t worry too much about where the person is coming from, especially if you understand the idea.
2. Be kind. You can say something generic and warm here, like “interesting!”
3. Always be cooking up research ideas. You probably have a dozen or so you’d like to work on, and another few dozen you find interesting. Any opportunity like this, find the nearest neighbor idea to what the person is talking about, and segue into it. Because of various factors (read: immense social pressure), the person probably won’t even notice if it’s a pretty big jump.⁰³

This is goal-oriented, and I wouldn’t say constitutes exactly having a “conversation,” but it’s an effective way to handle an input of an onslaught of wet-behind-the-ears folks saying the word “interesting,” and your output needing to be research papers.

Thank you for reading, I hope you found this interesting.