The suppression and modification of high-energy objects, like jets, in heavy-ion collisions provide an important window to access the degrees of freedom of the quark-gluon plasma on different length scales. Despite increasingly precise and differential measurements of the properties of jets in heavy-ion collisions, however, it has remained challenging to use jets to make unambiguous and model-independent statements about the quark-gluon plasma. Here I will give a personal take on some origins of these challenges, including the difficulty of modelling and biases from jet selection that obfuscate the direct interpretation of jet modification measurements. I will discuss a few model studies that have helped to disentangle the source of non-intuitive effects in measurements, and finally highlight data-driven approaches as an interesting opportunity toward studying the quark-gluon plasma in a model-independent way using jets.
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