Mathematicians make sense of chaos | Hacker News Reader

Mathematicians make sense of chaos

quantamagazine.org

76 pointsrbanffy21 comments

Fun fact I love to repeat: Quanta Magazine gets most of their funding from the Simons Foundation which gets some of its proceeds from the Medallion fund, which uses deep mathematical techniques to do absurdly successful daytrading, most of which comes from other daytraders losses.

So every time someone loses money on Robinhood, they contribute to Quanta Magazine lol.

A lot of theoretical physics research is funded by bored rich traders (who are disproportionately physics people)

Are these titles getting worse everyday or is it just me? This is such a blatant clickbait that it makes me not want to click.

I've been a Math teacher for forty years now. If you think this title is pumping out the clicks, making big bucks for the ad networks, then I must say that your experience and mine are very, very different. :-)

I understand that math -in general- don't have much public appeal. But I don't think that exempts math-related articles from having titles which actually reflect their content.

"Mathematicians Make Sense of Chaos" is, in my opinion, the same as "Cancer Cured". Which cancer, at which stage, what method, on how many people, how, etc. etc. No matter how interesting the article (don't get me wrong, this IS a very interesting article) you are misdirecting the readers and that's not cool I think.

>Which cancer, at which stage, what method, on how many people, how, etc. etc

Presumably that would be in the article body, which can't all fit in the title.

A better title is "New treatment improve survival rate of cancer patients". It's not a lie. If they have a few extra characters they can add the type of cancer (that is a very important detail) (perhaps the part of the body instead of the technical name), the name of the drug (it's nice to search info) or where the research was done (people love the human touch). The stage is very important, but perhaps it's too technical.

I'd like to see if it's it was tested in humans/mice/vitro, many articles with a title that says "cure" are actually articles about a promising in vitro experiment.

Also if they had a control group[1], because there are a lot of cures that are just an optimistic view of bad methodology. I think most of the times it's not on purpose, they just skip a few steps to make the research faster, but the steps are there to avoid repeating error detected in previos studies.

[1] Preregistered double blind randomized controlled clinical trials that are good enough to be published in a serious peer review journal, or it didn't happen.

May I suggest you consult a dictionary for 'make sense of'.

It's not like this is Buzzfeed. Quanta's target audience is very much NOT people who would normally be interested in clickbait titles.

I am no mathematician (I’m the OP), but to take this title literally is absurd. If not, we’d have discovered a way to have perfect knowledge of all events, past and future, and proved the whole universe is deterministic, and that it can be entirely represented by a tractable number of values.

The Simons Foundation spends money; the money has already been made. Quanta Magazine wants readers, but not for ad revenue. Their metric for success is relative to their intended audience, which is interested in science.

What exactly did you want instead?

I don’t speak for parent, and I don’t care if math article titles are sensationalized or not. But FWIW my experience just now was reading the title and thinking “Oh, cool, there’s news! Maybe a new paper that found insights into these problems nobody has solved yet.” -Click- Ah, this is a blog post about Poincare, there’s no news here, bummer. The title on the page starts with the word “How”, and is different from the HN title. “How mathematicians make sense of Chaos” suddenly no longer implies there’s news. This seems like a problem with the HN title and not the article, since best practice here is to submit the title from the article unedited.

I think a lot of people submit to HN from some kind of automated tool that strips out the "how" from headlines that begin with it

I used the bookmarklet. It grabs the html title element from the page, not the visible title.

Oh, I see. My apologies to you for suggesting it was a conscious choice! I didn’t realize this was a publishing thing, so it could be something even the author didn’t do. Maybe the html element does get worded by the publisher to try to ‘increase engagement’.

Which title are you commenting on? The HN title, or the article title?

IMO it is because we need to retire the word "chaos" in this context.

To me, that James Gleick book had massive negative value. It branded the important fields of dynamics and complex systems as "chaos" and fractals.

We have probably lost a whole generation of research in these fields from not being taken seriously because no one wants a PhD in "chaos".

>> Understand the horseshoe, and you can get a handle on chaos itself.

Profound quote for the day.

I liked this one 'Chaos itself turns out to be stable'

which, of course, is dependent on perspective, or zoom level.

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