I am Working on a Big Idea, am I?

There was an interesting discussion in our group recently about whether we might be deceiving ourselves into thinking we’re doing more than we actually are.

“We like to talk about how we’re different from other researchers because […] we think more deeply—and I’m worried this is starting to lead us to think we know better than others.”

This really resonated with me. Lately, when I explain why I haven’t published any papers since coming to MIT, I always say something like, “Oh, because I’m working on a big idea—Semi-Formal Programming.” But then it made me wonder: how do we define a big idea? What counts as deep research? And more critically—does that mean other people are doing small ideas or shallow research?

I recently came across a Paul Graham’s blog post about How to Do Great Work, where he talks about some key characteristics behind doing meaningful work. He points out that while we can’t precisely define what great work is, there are common patterns in how people approach it: like focusing on novel problems rather than just novel solutions, or being willing to spend an “unreasonable amount of time on a problem”. That said, not all problems require that kind of time, so there’s no single formula. There are many ways to do great work, and ultimately, it comes down to the trade-offs we’re willing to make. We all want to do great work, but it might means that we need to take the risk of, say, missing two paper deadlines a year or not being able to go to UIST25, which is in Korea… :(

I think a “big idea” isn’t a binary thing, it’s a high dimension vector space where people make different value trade-offs to approach to. And since statistically we can’t really predict which work will get the most citations or win a Nobel Prize, maybe it’s not even worth trying to aim for that. What is worth doing is just focusing on the work we care about, being responsible for it (publish only when it’s ready), and staying aware of the trade-offs we’re making.

So next time someone asks me what I’m working on, I’ll probably say:

“I’m working on an idea that I think just needs more time to think things through. ”

But honestly, I’m just having too much travel :) Sorry about that, Arvind.