The hard part isn't noticing when papers are bad, it's deciding what to do afterwards

Written (very) quickly for the Inkhaven Residency. I used to hate the classic management adage of “bring me solutions, not problems”. After all, identifying problems is the first step of solving them, and clearly understanding a problem is often a substantial part of the difficulty of solving it. (It also doesn’t help that I’ve sat in on many modern management classes where this adage was treated as obviously wrong and outdated.) But over time, I’ve realized the adage contains some amount of wisdom, at least in the context of research.