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Comment by mFixman | Hacker News Reader

I'm impressed by how clear the article is for a layman. I only know the very basics of graph theory and Ramsay theory and I understood the topic perfectly. This is in comparison to the paper [1] which at a glance seems terse and difficult to understand.

If anyone likes Ramsay theory and these kind of articles, I recommend Erdős' biography "The Man Who Loved Only Numbers".

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.04994

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Quanta Magazine does an excellent job with balancing accessible writing and advanced topics. It's just enough to get someone interested in the problem and the basic ideas to start thinking about it.

I wonder who it's written for? I feel like I understand all the articles, which is worrying because how would I know if I'm right.

The usual Gell-Mann way - when they write an article about a topic you know very well, you see whether you find it "mildly annoying" (because there are always small inaccuracies or papering-overs that seem a big deal to us), or "hilariously bad", or "so outrageous the writer ought to be fired". The quality of the other articles you aren't qualified to judge can then be assumed to be in a cloud around where you judged this one to be.

I have the opposite problem here. The CS articles seem fine, but I don't know who would be interested in Quanta's articles but only capable of understanding things at their writing level. It doesn't seem like they should have an audience.

Their audience is me, a curious not-very-technical layman who is interested in the concepts but bored by the details!

Granted, I'm not sure how common this is.

I do worry about Gell-Mann amnesia with Quanta, but I comfort myself that usually nobody has a stake in distorting this or that number theory thingamajig or physics quandary. However... I'm sure there are academic infights and research tug-of-war to which I'm blissfully blind.

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