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Comment by RA_Fisher | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think it’s realistic to think that software engineers can pick up advanced statistical modeling on the job, unless they’re pairing with statisticians. There’s just too much background involved.

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The "search practitioners" I'm referring to are pretty uniformly ML Engineers . They also work on feeds, recommendations, and adjacent Information Retrieval spaces. Both to generate L0 retrieval candidates and to do higher layers of reranking with learning to rank and other systems to whatever the system's goal is...

You can decide if you agree that most people are sufficiently statistically literate in that group of people. But some humility around statistics is probably far up there in what I personally interview for.

For sure. There are ML folks with statistical learning backgrounds, but it tends to be relatively rare. Physics and CS are more common. They tend to view things like you mention, more procedural eg- learning to rank, minimizing distances, less statistical modeling. Humility around statistics is good, but statistical knowledge is still what's required to really level up these systems (I've built them as well).

Your overall condescending attitude in this thread is really disgusting.

Statisticians are famously disliked, especially by engineers (there are open-minded folks, of course! maybe they’d taken some econometrics or statistics, are exceptionally humble, etc). There are some interesting motives and incentives around that. Sometimes I think in part it’s because many people would prefer their existing beliefs be upheld as opposed to challenged, even if they’re not well-supported (and likely to lead to bad decisions and outcomes). Sticking with outdated technology is one example.

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