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Comment by mpfundstein | Hacker News Reader

Is it me or is the article written like for 5 year olds? It feels like I am reading a child book.

However, this is such a great achievement. Would be awesome to learn more about the algorithm.

Because it is. If it reads like a child book they did a great job. If you studied journalism you’d know making it as easy as possible for all audiences is a key skill each journalist needs to have. It’s not a science journal that it needs to be full of jargon. It’s meant for general audience and they did a great job. If you want a hard piece go read the journal papers that got published.

There are degrees of this. If you compare science reporting against the mainstream financial news it is like chalk and cheese. If the numbers represent money, technical jargon is everywhere, if the subject is scientific, even the numbers are considered scary, never mind a technical discussion around them.

It's called dumbing down.

Welcome to 99% of the BBC's science output. Outside of Radio4, it has become a barren wasteland where no numbers can increment.

Why is that a bad thing? One of the main drivers of people getting into STEM is and has always been popular science - taking a complicated subject like this project, or gravitational waves, or the LHC etc, and describing it in a language that everyone can understand. And if you can understand it, there's a higher chance it interests you, which will lead to digging some more, etc etc etc.

As I understand it that’s how articles look when a major organisation establishes SEO as a primary metric.

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