One of the things I like to think about while watching research talks is whether the work faces inward or outward. Inward facing research is mostly concerned with itself. A paper that uses most of its length to prove a theorem would be an example, as would a paper about a new operating system that is mainly about the optimizations that permit the system to perform well. Outward facing research is less self-aware, it is more about how the piece of work fits into the world. For example, our mathematical paper could be made to face outwards by putting the proof into an appendix and instead discussing uses of the new result, or how it relates to previous work. The OS paper could demonstrate how users and applications will benefit from the new abstractions. Computer science tends to produce a mix of outward and inward facing research.
Next let’s turn to the question of whether a given paper or presentation should be inward or outward facing. This is subjective and contextual so we’ll do it using examples. First, the mathematical paper. If the proof is the central result and it gives us new insights into the problem, then of course all is as it should be. Similarly, if the operating system’s use case is obvious but the optimizations are not, and if performance is the critical concern, then again no problem. On the other hand, researchers have a tendency to face inward even when this is not justified. This is natural: we know more about our research’s internal workings than anyone else, we find it fascinating (or else we wouldn’t be doing it), we invent some new terminology and notation that we like and want to show off, etc. — in short, we get caught up in the internal issues that we spend most of our time thinking about. It becomes easy to lose track of which of these issues other people need to know about and which ones should have stayed in our research notebooks. Let’s say that we’re working on a new kind of higher-order term conflict analysis (just making this up, no offense to that community if it exists). One way to structure a paper about it would be to discuss the twists and turns we took while doing the work, to perform a detailed comparison of the five variants of the conflict analysis algorithm that we created, and to provide a proof that the analysis is sound. Alternatively, if the running time of the analysis isn’t actually that important, we could instead use some space demonstrating that a first-order analysis is wholly unsuitable for solving modern problems stemming from the big data revolution. Or, it might so happen that the analysis’s soundness is not the main concern, in which case we can use that space a better way.
I hope it is becoming clear that while some work is naturally inward facing and some outward facing, as researchers we can make choices about which direction our work faces. The point of this piece is that we should always at least consider making our work more outward facing. The cost would be that some of our inner research monologue never sees the light of day. The benefit is that perhaps we learn more about the world outside of our own work, helping others to understand its importance and helping ourselves choose more interesting and important problems to work on.