Comment by marojejian

9 days ago

Thanks for the detailed response to that comment. I just read and enjoyed your article, and your response seems accurate.

I can imagine it's tough to put that much effort into communicating something complex to a wide audience, only to have a bunch of very smart people here attempt to tear it apart.

1 comment

marojejian

bbrubaker 6 days ago

Thanks for the kind words! I do get lots of gratifying positive feedback as well. I don't make a habit of arguing with strangers online, but I felt obliged to correct the record here for anyone who might encounter this later and come away thinking "wow, I can't believe Quanta got it completely backward."

Here on HN people often complain about the level of detail, which is fair! I think they are often falling prey to a common fallacy about conditional probabilities. P("X reads Quanta"|"X has some technical background (college STEM major or more)") is likely larger than it is for most popular science magazine. But P("Y has some technical background"|"Y reads Quanta") is much lower than many people realize. There is a limit on how much technical stuff I can put in an article and still have it be accessible to many of our readers, and I care a lot about making things accessible.