  General relativity is highly successful in explaining a wide range of
gravitational phenomena including the gravitational waves emitted by binary
systems and the shadows cast by supermassive black holes. From a modern
perspective the theory is not fundamental though, but constitutes the lowest
order term in an effective field theory description of the gravitational force.
As a consequence, the gravitational dynamics should receive corrections by
higher-derivative terms. This essay discusses structural aspects associated
with these corrections and summarizes their imprint on static, spherically
symmetric geometries. Along these lines, we critically reassess the common
practice of using local field redefinitions in order to simplify the dynamics
at the danger of shifting physics effects into sectors which are beyond the
approximation under consideration.
