What is research?

Our English teacher from school once asked us a question: “What is X?” and a student politely
raised his hand and said: “The Oxford dictionary defines X as blah blah blah ...”. When I heard
this phrase, I was very impressed. I thought “What an elegant way to start the answer!”. But
then a weird thing happened. The next time our teacher asked this question, another student
used the same phrase. And this pattern repeated forever. It became a ritual; as if the “correct”
way to answer such a question was to start with the Oxford dictionary phrase. A similar thing
happened in a drawing class. The teacher told us to draw some scenery. And invariably, all the
students drew almost the exact same scenery. This scenery had a sunrise, a mountain, a river,
a tree, and a house. “How is this possible? Is this a mere coincidence? a one-off event?” I
thought. It was only much later that I realised that these two incidents were not mere
coincidences but rather the result of Indian education system working as desired. You see, the
goal of our schooling system is to create obedient citizens who are capable of following orders.
To do so, it is crucial to ensure that their brains work in a predictable/similar fashion. I will not
comment on foreign education system but I am pretty sure that it is no utopia either. Otherwise,
why would this TED talk [1] garner so many views?

Ok, now let’s focus on the main topic of this post, i.e., “What is research?”. How do we answer

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this question without using the Oxford dictionary phrase? The best way to do that is to not
answer the question . Instead, we will focus on another closely related question: “Is research
a creative process?” I don’t think there’s a clear-cut answer to this question, so I will just present
my point of view (you may respectfully disagree, if you so wish). I think, at its very core,
research is indeed a creative process. I have certain data points to back up this hypothesis.
Have a look at this interview of Geoffrey Hinton taken by Andrew Ng [2]. Around 29:40 mark,
Hinton is asked to give some advice to young researchers. And his advice is to not focus too
much on literature review but rather to trust and build on one’s intuitions. He said that building
on one’s intuitions is crucial for a creative researcher. The very fact that he used the phrase
“creative researcher” shows that he believes research to be creative.

Assuming that you agree with my hypothesis, we can take the discussion one step further. The
cool thing is that all the creative fields work in a similar fashion. Be it acting, music, painting, or
research. An individual who takes up a creative field as a profession has two contrasting
strategies at his/her disposal: (i) doing the bare minimum, (ii) allowing one’s creativity to take

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over the process. Let me explain the two in some detail. Strategy (i), in music, corresponds to
slightly modifying your previous tunes to create new ones or copying other people’s tunes .
In research, strategy (i) corresponds to incremental work. Unlike music, there is nothing wrong
with incremental work. It is often necessary and extremely important since no progress can be
made if all the papers propose a completely new theory/experimental design. Strategy (ii) is
about using one’s creativity to generate truly novel work. I still remember when I first heard “Dil
Se Re”, I thought “This sounds so weird. Is this even music?” You see, at that time, I was only
exposed to bollywood songs like ankhiyon se goli maare, unchi hai building. With this
background, “Dil Se Re” sounded so different that it questioned my beliefs about the very
definition of music. The song eventually aged like fine wine and became one of my favorite
songs.

Now that we have the two strategies covered, let’s delve a bit further. While it might be tempting
to always choose strategy (i), the disadvantage is that your brain will no longer be intellectually
stimulated and then, after some point of time, your work will become mundane. On the other
hand, the issue with strategy (ii) is that it is high-risk, high-reward. You might spend your entire
life following strategy (ii) without making any progress. Or you might make progress at a much
later stage in life and, by then, your financial/emotional well-being is terribly affected. There are
several such examples in history. This conundrum can be posed in terms of game
theory/reinforcement learning. If done so, the question becomes: What is the ideal
strategy/policy? In this Yale interview [3] around 36:15 mark, SRK was asked the exact same
question. I am so grateful that someone actually managed to ask this question to SRK in such a
blunt manner. And SRK answered so elegantly that the key is to find the right balance (I urge
you to listen to his answer). So, I guess the ideal strategy lies somewhere in the middle (this is
true for most things in life, isn’t it?).

Disclaimer: This post may suffer from confirmation bias, survivorship bias, and/or post hoc ergo
propter hoc, therefore take it with a pinch of salt.

References
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eyhCTvrEtE
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0OaOnT8res