Research taste is a skill nobody talks about. How do you develop it without collaborators? [D]

If you've ever built an elegant, complex ML pipeline to solve something a 10-line prompt could've handled. this is for you. i've been thinking about what separates people who do useful research from people who do impressive-looking research. it's almost always the problems you choose rather than raw technical skill. here's the mental model i've landed on. every problem kind of follows these steps: find a clear problem people actually care about try the dumbest solution first.