The Three Pillars of Research

Every craft worth learning, everywhere, for most of human history, has been taught the same way: a beginner stands next to a master and does the work until the work becomes theirs. Blacksmiths, surgeons, painters, chefs, violinists. We have had books for millennia and universities for centuries, and still, when the skill actually matters, we do not hand someone a manual—we put them next to someone who already has it. There is a Tang-dynasty line about this, from Han Yu, that I keep coming back to: 师者，传道授业解惑也. A teacher is one who transmits the Way, imparts the skills, and resolves doubts. Three jobs, written down in the year 802, and they are still the three jobs.

Why an apprenticeship? Because the part that matters can’t be written down. The knowledge is tacit: we always know more than we can put into words. You can read every paper on how to ride a bicycle and you will still fall off the bicycle. The knowledge that makes an expert lives mostly below language—in the hands, in the judgment, in the thousand small calls that no one ever wrote into a manual because no one could. The only known way to transfer it is proximity. You watch someone do it, you try, they correct you, you try again.

A PhD is the last apprenticeship most people will ever do, and the data backs the framing: roughly half of people who start a PhD don’t finish, and a leading factor in who finishes isn’t intelligence or undergraduate pedigree—it’s the advising relationship. The research on doctoral attrition points the same way: what happens to students after they arrive matters more for finishing than the qualifications they brought with them. And what happens after they arrive is, mostly, an apprenticeship that either works or doesn’t.

So here is a fair question for anyone in that position, and for me as someone on the other side of it: what, exactly, is supposed to get transmitted? If I am the master in this arrangement, what is the Way? I have spent a while trying to name it honestly, and I keep landing on three things.

The three pillars

Taste. Knowing which problems are worth your life. Not whether you can solve something—whether you should. Which of a hundred directions is worth a year, which clean-looking result is actually an artifact, when to kill your own favorite idea. Taste is the part people assume is innate and mystical. It isn’t. It’s learnable, and most of research failure is taste failure—brilliant execution pointed at a question nobody needed answered.

Execution. Turning a good idea into a real thing that works and that you can trust. For us in computer systems this means building: prototyping fast, diving into a million lines of someone else’s code, understanding the layers beneath you well enough that you’re not fooled by them, and—the unglamorous core—finishing before the deadline. An idea you can’t build is a wish.

Communication. Getting the thing out of your head and into other heads. Writing the paper, giving the talk, and the quieter daily kind: telling your collaborators the truth, early, especially when it’s bad. Research that nobody can understand or trust may as well not exist—the best idea in the world is worthless if it stays in your head.

That’s the framework. Three pillars. I’m aware that “three pillars” is the kind of phrase that should make you suspicious—every consultant has three of something. I won’t claim this carves reality perfectly at the joints; you can name things a researcher does that sit awkwardly across the lines (raising money, managing people, surviving the politics). But I think the three are non-arbitrary, for a reason worth stating up front, because it’s the spine of everything that follows.

Why these three: the work is modeling three things that aren’t you

Here is the claim. Research is the discipline of building accurate models of three systems, none of which is you, and the three pillars are just what it takes to model each one.

Taste is modeling the field—understanding it well enough to know what it actually needs, which problems are real, which results matter. Execution is modeling the machine—understanding the system and the hardware beneath you well enough that you can make them do what you intend. Communication is modeling other minds—understanding the people in your audience well enough to move an idea from your head into theirs. Decide what to work on, make it, move it between minds: each is an act of getting inside something that isn’t you and being right about it. That isn’t a slide with three boxes. It’s the same hard skill—accurate empathy for a system—pointed at three different targets. Hold onto that; the last post pays it off.

It also explains the failure modes, which is the practical test. Because the three are separable (you can be strong at one and weak at another), you can diagnose a stuck student by which model is broken. A student with taste and communication but no execution gives beautiful talks about systems that don’t run—their model of the machine is wrong. One with execution and communication but no taste ships flawless solutions to problems nobody has—their model of the field is wrong. One with taste and execution but no communication does excellent work that dies on their hard drive—they never modeled the reader at all. I have advised all three. Different broken model, different fix.

And there’s a happy coincidence I can’t resist. The three line up with Han Yu’s three verbs: 传道, transmit the Way, is taste—the sense of what’s worth doing; 授业, impart the skills, is execution—the craft of making the thing; 解惑, resolve doubts, is communication—the dialogue that only happens in language. A line from the year 802 and a framework I arrived at by watching students struggle in 2026 landing in the same place isn’t proof of anything. Old ideas about teaching and new ideas about research can rhyme by accident. But it did make me like the decomposition more.

One word on why taste comes first, since it’s the pillar people most doubt can be taught. Think of food. A good palate isn’t only a filter that keeps you from wasting a meal on something bad—it’s also what lets you enjoy eating, because you can taste the difference between fine and extraordinary. Research taste is the same: not just a filter against bad problems, but the thing that lets you enjoy the work, because you can feel the gap between a result that’s merely publishable and one that’s beautiful. People with taste have more fun, and since research is long, the fun is most of what keeps you in it.

The good news, which I’ll spend the next three posts on, is that all three pillars are trainable. Not equally easily—taste is the slowest and the most apprenticeship-shaped, execution rewards raw hours the most, communication is the most teachable and the most neglected. But none of them is a gift you either have or don’t. I’ve watched all three grow in people, including in myself, and the growth follows patterns regular enough to write down.

So that’s what I’m going to try to do here. One post per pillar:

Taste—how to judge work, and how to generate ideas worth judging.
Execution—coding vs. programming vs. hacking, systems, and the boring discipline that beats talent.
Communication—writing, speaking, and telling the truth to the people you work with.

The honest disclaimer up front: this is one systems researcher’s view, shaped by my own field and my own mistakes. Take what’s useful. But I’ve taught these three things for years now, mostly by proximity, the way they’ve always been taught—and writing them down is my attempt to make the apprenticeship a little less tacit. To tell a bit more than I thought I could.