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Comment by billyjobob | Hacker News Reader

In academia I would often meet people who were unable to explain what they working on in language I could understand, even though their PhDs were in the same field as my own. Sometimes I would have to interrogate them for more than ten minutes, like getting blood from a stone, before I got a clue what it was. I think if you can't explain what are you doing in general terms in 30 seconds to a layman you probably don't really understand what you are doing.

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Not every research topic can be explained to a layman in 30 seconds (personally, I think it's cruel to expect that). Some research work only makes sense within a certain context or background, and it can sometimes take a lot more than 30 seconds to explain that context, or the background behind it. The academic him/herself can understand the work very well, because he/she also has a very good graps of the related concepts.

For a concrete example, I work on compiler research. To explain my work to a layman, first I have to explain "compiler"; for that, I need to explain "native code" and "programming language". That can take a lot more than 30 seconds.

"I am trying to find ways to improve the translation from a language people like to a language computers like."

Well done, you've said "compiler research". You've just spent 10 seconds explaining 'what is mathematics' instead of what project he's actually working on. Plus your explanation would leave someone with very little idea about computers even more confused: is he going through some novel and translating it into another language like french? You made him sound like a translator.

The CEO you've now explained what he does now has a good idea - translating between human languages usually loses some of the intricacies of the statement and makes it seem unnatural. It's better to just get someone to write directly in french rather than translating it from english, right? So the CEO will fire the compiler researcher and hire someone to code in ASM. Good job.

I'm being silly here, but the point still stands: explaining something complex is fraught with dangers when there is no mutual understanding of the subject matter. You might think you've explained something, and the listener might thing he has understood, but in reality you have now simply created completely invalid assumptions in a person's mind. The greatest example of this I've seen is regarding quantum mechanics and observation collapsing the wave. There is a whole quasi-spiritual movement that now believes that the world is shaped by conscious observation - talk about missing the point!

Well, there's a minimal set of things you must mention to fully explain something. The only way to explain his PhD fully would be to read his PhD dissertation, as that's what the definition of a dissertation is.

Summarizing is about maximizing the amount of information conveyed per word. Saying "you have failed to explain what he does in two sentences" is a bit silly, since, if one could fully explain his PhD in two sentences, it wouldn't be a PhD.

That applies to any contribution to compiler research, and is hardly a good answer to "what is your PhD about?", namely if asked in an academic setting.

What I meant was that explaining my work to a layman would necessarily start with "I work on compilers", and then I'd have to explain what a compiler is before going into the specifics of my own contributions.

Hmm...in order for me to really explain to you why robust PCA is needed. I will have to explain to you what PCA is. In order for that, I would have to explain why? High dimensional spaces with lower dimensional information, understand what dimensions are, what a basis is, why variance is a brittle measure, why outliers break it, so we get to robust PCA.

Or I could tell you that I find better ways of extracting information from data.

Your pick. The latter just sounds like shit. But just because you have a degree in computer science doesn't necessarily mean you will have the tools to understand that.

In my experience, this usually occurs because they want to tell you about _their_ research, instead of just their field.

It's easy to give an intelligible answer that could be equally applicable to any of about 100 PhD theses. But getting someone to explain their specific contribution in under 5 minutes is often going to be pretty difficult.

> I think if you can't explain what are you doing in general terms in 30 seconds to a layman you probably don't really understand what you are doing.

Often repeated and attributed (apocryphally?) to Einstein but has never been true. Lots of scientists lack the skills required to explain their work succinctly to a general audience, and it doesn't mean they don't understand their own work.

Or maybe their work doesn't require billyjobob's personal approval and understanding, and therefore they don't feel like putting in the effort of reducing their life to 30 seconds?

It's really simple to give someone “30 seconds explanation”. Unfortunately it's not an explanation at all, it's still “30 seconds explanation”.

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