The threat is comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing

Summary

The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. Imagine you're a new assistant professor at a research university. You just got the job, you just got a small pot of startup funding, and you just hired your first two PhD students: Alice and Bob. You're in astrophysics. This is the beginning of everything. You do what your supervisor did for you, years ago: you give each of them a well-defined project. Something you know is solvable, because other people have solved adjacent versions of it. Something that would take you, personally, about a month or two. You expect it to take each student about a year, because they don't know what they're doing yet, and that's the point. The project isn't the deliverable. The project is the vehicle. The deliverable is the scientist that comes out the other end. Alice's project is to build an analysis pipeline for measuring a particular statistical signature in galaxy clustering data. Bob's is something similar in scope and difficulty, a different signal, a different dataset, the same basic arc of learning. You send them each a few papers to read, point them at some publicly available data, and tell them to start by reproducing a known result. Then you wait. The academic year unfolds the way academic years do. You have weekly meetings with each student. Alice gets stuck on the coordinate system. Bob can't get his likelihood function to converge. Alice writes a plotting script that produces garbage. Bob misreads a sign convention in a key paper and spends two weeks chasing a factor-of-two error. You give them both similar feedback: read the paper again, check your units, try printing the intermediate output, think about what the answer should look like before you look at what the code gives you. Normal things. The kind of things you say fifty times a year and never remember saying. By summer, both students have finished. Both papers are solid. Not groundbreaking, not going to change the field, but correct, useful, and publishable. Both go ...