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Comment by tpoacher | Hacker News Reader

"To the surprise of experts in the field, a postdoctoral statistician has solved ..."

Wth? Am I the only one bothered by this opening statement? A post-doc IS an expert in the field. One who has spent a significant number of years doing a PhD to become THE expert in their own particular subfield, and presumably many more years after that diving into even greater detail.

Since when have we grown so accustomed to postdocs that we're treating them as on par with undergraduates in terms of academic value, and are so super surprised when they make an important discovery?

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I think you may be misunderstanding the implication. It's not that he's a postdoc that's surprising, but that he's a statistician who happens to have solved a major problem in convex geometry. The following quote sums it up:

"Chen is not a convex geometer by training — instead, he is a statistician who became interested in the KLS conjecture because he wanted to get a handle on random sampling. “No one knows Yuansi Chen in our community,” Eldan said. “It’s pretty cool that you have this guy coming out of nowhere, solving one of [our] most important problems.”"

The great thing is, the reaction of the community working on these type of problems was to understand and verify the result. And once it was, all credit to him.

Thanks for this explanation. That makes it slightly better I guess. It still sounds subtly presumptive though, when placed as the subheading. It feels a bit like when journalists report female scientists and feel the need to report their marital status in the first paragraph.

Absolutely not at all. Statistics and geometry are very different fields. Sure they both use some part of mathematics and an undergrad level statistics and geometry curriculum will have many common classes, but at post-doc level it is definitely surprising. I'm not saying a statistician is not qualified to do research in geometry -- they might be competent enough to do so -- it's just surprising because statistics and geometry work on different problems.

It’s not like that at all.

It’s like reporting “chemist solves problem in particle physics” — which is interesting and a bit unexpected, but not at all an unrelated factoid about the person in the way marital status would be.

Like I said, it's not the news itself, it's the phrasing of the subheading that bothers me.

To use your example, it's more like saying "experts surprised female chemist solves problem in particle physics", when "chemist solves problem in particle physics" would have been so much better.

But I take your point.

What word in the subheading do you believe is like “female” in your example?

“Postdoctoral”?

I’m genuinely confused here.

It sounds like “experts surprised professional chemist solves problem in particle physics”.

“Professional chemist” is a meaningful title, unlike “female chemist”. The problem with naked “chemist” is that there’s a lot of grades — from student to hobbyist to YouTuber to postdoc to PI for industry lab.

How are you interpreting “postdoc” the same way as “female”?

One if those is a job; one of those is a biological fact.

> A post-doc IS an expert in the field.

Other people have already mentioned it, but to phrase it another way: he's a expert in a different field.

Is it not referring to the fact that they are a postdoctoral _statistician_ and not a "geometrician" or something of that nature?

Geometer, not geometrician, but yes, you're right.

As others have mentioned, and as someone who does statistics, I think you're putting the emphasis on the wrong word in "postdoctoral statistician".

If I solved a major open problem in geometry, Quanta could easily write "To the surprise of experts in the field, a professor of epidemiology has solved..." and they'd be correct in doing so.

The surprising thing is not that he's a post-doc, it's that he's a statistician.

Others have pointed out the misread here, but I'll add that typically the thing you are actually expert in after this amount of study is typically very narrow. So when they say "the surprise of experts in the field" on many topics "the experts" they are referring to is often a few dozen people.

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