the mantra for pilots is "aviate, navigate, communicate" in that order, meaning "fly the damn plane" first (don't enter an unrecoverable state) and then make sure you're going in the right direction and then talk to air traffic control, basically pay attention to the three things that can get you into trouble in the order of how fast that trouble can arrive.
temporal priority aside though, actually carrying out these objectives requires understanding, the most important currency of any complex activity: flying the plane is largely a mechanical procedure if you understand which angle it's pointing and how fast it's going and what autopilot mode it's in but a hellish nightmare if you don't, navigation and communication are also straightforward if you're keeping track of what's going on, but accidents usually result from the kind of confusion where people don't realise they are confused and are too busy or distracted to stop and notice they've lost touch with reality.
I think about that while driving but also these days while carrying out AI assisted software engineering, which has made understanding what's going on even more important than it used to be; the connection with flight is that it's easy to slip into the mode of developing while distracted and not realise you're doing so, and failures of understanding can take some time to manifest as critical problems.
This reminds me of how calculators can become a problem for some people: you need to know enough math to understand what you’re doing with the calculator, and enough math to understand what it spits out.
Applying the wrong formula won’t magically result in the calculator giving you the right answer.
garbage in, garbage out, or in the words of Charles Babbage:
On two occasions I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
and politicians never got better at understanding computers 😌
