Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
Are big name researchers like him actually doing any of the grunt work or just get handed authorship for having answered one question asked by a PhD student?
Yeah yeah not all researchers, but in the ML space I usually see some very big names appear as 5th or 6th authors in inconsequential papers and am left wondering, why are they even there?
The biggest contribution might even be "asked one question answered by a PhD student" rather than the other way around. My first original math discovery as a grad student turned out to be an idea that was published before I was born, but was just esoteric enough that I hadn't heard of it. My third was something that I got beaten to, because I didn't realize the problem was that interesting (I thought it was just another test case for my second) and I blabbed about it at a conference to someone who turned out to be 10% closer to it than I was but who just hadn't considered using his research on my question before.
I eventually learned to run more by my advisor. Having someone who's been in a field a few decades to tell you what's more or less worth working on is invaluable. Even just having someone who knows what to look for and where to look can be useful. I taught a student once who invented a numerical method I'd never seen before, one with just the right mix of "tricky enough that it might have been missed" and "valuable enough that it ought to be published", but by this point I knew which book to pull off the shelf and which chapter to hunt through to find the prior discovery without having to spend days on the literature search.
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