A random thought: mentees and mentors in the sciences and computational fields need to understand the X-Y Problem. I help a lot of people with computational stuff and early on they& #39;ll often hear me ask "wait, what is it you& #39;re trying to do... is this an x-y problem?".

An x-y problem is when someone comes to you with problem (usually computational) asking you how to get y working. A clever helper will immediately ask "what is it you need y for exactly?" and find out the user is actually trying to do x, and thinks y is the solution.

Far more often than not, the right way to do x is *not* y — e.g. there& #39;s some function they weren& #39;t aware of, or some API, that would make solving x far easier than their solution y. I would say 80% of the computational problems I help with are x-y problems.

more info:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_p... href=" http://xyproblem.info/ ">https://xyproblem.info/">... https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/66377/what-is-the-xy-problem">https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions...

What is the XY problem?

What is the XY problem? When asking questions, how do I recognize when I'm falling into it? How do I avoid it? Return to FAQ index

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XY_problem