[BadCookie]

I took a machine learning graduate-level course from Andrew Ng himself, and I don't recall learning about Jaccard indexes or topic drift. Maybe your sense of what counts as "very, very, very basic" is skewed toward your own experience. There's a phenomenon known to psychologists where people tend to think that the stuff that they know is very easy and basic, so they conclude that anybody who doesn't know what they know must be uneducated. But then it turns out that the person you think is uneducated knows about a bunch of surprising stuff that you don't. I can't remember the term for this phenomenon, but I often remember it whenever I find myself beginning to judge another person's expertise. This phenomenon is also super relevant to the failings of most technical interviews, in my opinion.

[eanzenberg]

There's a bit of snobbiness in different areas of tech, although there also are in different areas of academia and research. At the end of the day, the most successful people are the ones who wouldn't dismiss a DS who didn't know "Jaccard index" or "the Halting Problem".

[aaron987]

Are you referring to the Curse of Knowledge?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge

What you are describing also sounds a little like the Dunning-Kruger effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

[mixmastamyk]

Oh, wish I knew the name of that phenomenon as well.