<p>I'm interpreting your question to mean "statistical newbie" rather than "Stack Exchange newbie" or "Cross Validated newbie". (If you're asking about the latter two, you advance pretty quickly. Just seeing what other say, comments, closed questions, etc, brings you up to speed fairly fast in most conventions of this site. Most...)</p>

<p>I feel like I've moved beyond statistics newbie, but that's due to lots of reading, lots of Cross Validated, and three years of on-the-job working, above and beyond my schooling. Beyond "not still a newbie", however, I still look at answers by gung, Macro, whuber, to list a few off the top of my head (but missing many great people -- sorry!) and feel inadequate. How do those guys know all of that stuff so seemingly intuitively? I'm not a newbie, I think I'm beyond a novice, but I'm a long ways from that expert level. What's the in-between? Journeyman?</p>

<p>But I can still answer questions. (Especially those with a more Computer Science/AI flavor, where by background is. And yes, I'll admit I'm a bad person who will answer R-specific questions whereas technically an R-specific question is off-topic. Maybe it's because I feel stronger in that area, so can give a better answer.)</p>
