The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Explanatory Reporting | Hacker News Reader

The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Explanatory Reporting

pulitzer.org

305 pointsdanso44 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 perform 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.

Source at 17:55: https://youtu.be/Q2u0dKRA1cA

It's fascinating how their algorithms only seem to work for insiders.

"...Renaissance Technologies’ famed Medallion fund, available only to current and former partners, had one of its best years ever, surging 76 percent, according to one of its investors. But it was a different story for outsiders who are only able to invest in other RenTec funds — two of which had their worst years ever. ..."

https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1q3fndg77d0tg...

My naive guess? Incentives.

Their institutional fund, which at one point was claimed to be capable of managing $100B, is also a dog.

And with 1.9% fees!

Nice story, though daytrader orders are very unlikely to be matched with such algorithms in practice. The majority get filled internally by the retail provider, or by order flow aggregators they route to before the orders make it out to an open market exchange.

Publication founded by mathematician Jim Simons who started a hedge fund that consistently beat the markets and made billions.

The entire story:

https://www.amazon.com/Man-Who-Solved-Market-Revolution/dp/0...

Lots of interesting information on the internet about him too:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)

There is a Numberphile interview with him that I remember being pretty interesting https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0

Echoing recent discussions on HN, from wikipedia:

"An article published in The New York Times in 2015 said that Simons was involved in one of the biggest tax battles of the year, with Renaissance Technologies being "under review by the I.R.S. over a loophole that saved their fund an estimated $6.8 billion in taxes over roughly a decade."[46] In September 2021, it was announced that Simons and his colleagues would pay billions of dollars in back taxes, interest and penalties to resolve the dispute, one of the biggest in IRS history"

(...)

"In total, Simons has given over $2.7 billion to philanthropic cause"

Even with accounting for that change RenTec’s returns don’t change all too much.

Do you know the denominator? I'm skeptical.

RenTec's secret sauce has always been their tax attorneys, not their quants. Prior to this "retirement fund" issue, RenTec was notorious for tax avoidance schemes like claiming LT capital gains on basket options.

The fund is rumored to be around $10B and generates about 44% per year (not compounded).

In any event, their secret sauce has always been teamwork and infrastructure.

People fail to remember that Simons created a world class math department at stony brook from scratch. He knows how to put smart people together and have them work together.

I believe that was because their most successful fund was the retirement fund for employees, or something along those lines. I heard they only lost this case because of a clerical error.

Simons may be the biggest tax cheat in US History.

I am big fan of Jim Simon's work as well as Quanta, really interesting that both are connected.

His foundation, the Simons Foundation, funds among a few other things, arXiv. I have wondered why other tech related billionaires do not sponsor more items in the scientific sphere like Simons does, because unlike funding a building at some rich university your money could actually be used for something useful and if something good comes out of it, having your name attached to it could mean a lot more than the name of some silly building (on top of the actual scientific progress it leads to).

I’ve often wondered why we, the public, don’t fund more items in the scientific sphere. Basic research, for example.

At one point, there was a “Kickstarter” for science but I haven’t gotten an email from them for years.

I think that is the case, no? The majority of research is funded by the government, i.e. taxpayers' money, even more so for basic research. The better question is why we taxpayers have to pay publishers to access research funded by ourselves.

Good news! It’s been years since most government funding sources have required research they fund to be open access. The NSF has required this since 2016 and the NIH since 2008. The bad news is that journals charge incredible fees to researchers to make their articles open access and so your tax dollars go (via grants to researchers) to these publishers to fund this. Which would be fine if the prices were more reasonable but they just keep increasing.

There was a company called Petridish that did exactly this. They pivoted after six months and became Blue Apron: https://vator.tv/news/2017-09-05-when-blue-apron-was-young-t...

One non-trivial part of it is that his (academic) expertise was in mathematical physics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chern%E2%80%93Simons_theory

What's wrong with paying for academic buildings to be built (and having your name on it)? The point is that students can go to the building and receive lectures, or run labs, or read books in the library. Who cares whose name is on the building... These buildings will stand for a long time anyway, soon nobody will know who that person was anyway (other than by the name of the building).

For me what’s wrong is that ”buildingless students” in rich universities is not a social problem at all, so funding those has no positive impact in the society.

One would think that such buildings would be built even without rich donors.

There's nothing wrong with it per se, it's just in my view the money could be better spent. If a university needs a new building it will get built regardless. In contrast, I know graduate students living off ramen and suffering because their stipends are so small. Here the work of Simons Foundation on funding grad students is of great help because it means the students don't have to focus on getting money on top of their research but just focus on their research, which should lead to better results.

For some reason he didn’t want to fund William Stein and his rival to Mathematica.

Today's plutocrats should be looking to people like Carnegie for inspiration.

He didn't pay to put his name on one or two libraries in influential universities, he paid to set up a national system of libraries which any person could walk into and make use of.

Why haven't any of our tycoons stepped up to create a national system of community centers, makerspaces, etc? I'll give you three guesses.

They decided fighting malaria and polio had higher priority?

FWIW, he does also have his name on a building: the Simons Institute at UC Berkeley. https://simons.berkeley.edu/

He also donated to Brookhaven to extend the operating time of one of the particle accelerators. (His Wikipedia entry doesn't mention this, remarkably).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_Heavy_Ion_Collide...

https://www.aip.org/fyi/2006/brookhaven-receives-outside-fun...

- "Brookhaven National Laboratory Director Praveen Chaudhari has announced a $13-million private contribution that will enable the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to operate for 20 full weeks this year. The money was raised by Jim Simons..."

Because billionaires are more often than egomaniacs and having your name be remembered is more important than the actual value of your charitable donations.

We grew up in a world dotted with buildings and universities with the names of robber-barons like Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller. Having your name carved into the stone of the building of a major institution means immortality (well, as long as the institution remains important) - directly sponsoring science might do more real good but it's not as good at sanitising your image or for being remembered long term, which are the real goals of most billionaires' philanthropy.

People don't remember John D. Rockefeller for the money he pumped into eradicating hookworm, probably the single greatest thing he did for the world in his life - ending generations of sapped energy and cognitive impairment in the American South. People remember him because his name is on the buildings and colleges he funded.

Gates (and Buffet via Gates) invests huge sums in science and tech via his foundation. Elon Musk funded the $100M XPrize for carbon removal. Yuri Milner funds the Breakthrough Prize in fundamental physics. Sergei Brin and Mark Zuckerberg are also breakthrough prize funders. Brin, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt are also major funders of X Prizes.

The list goes on and on. These things just aren’t widely reported because they are boring and don’t fit narratives favored by much of the press.

Zuckerberg has a very interesting medical imaging research program as well: https://chanzuckerberg.com/science/programs-resources/imagin...

Numberphile have done a pretty good interview with him which is worth a watch. There is both a full length 1 hour interview [0] and a cut down interview running 18 minutes [1].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVDqfUhXOY

The citation:

> For coverage that revealed the complexities of building the James Webb Space Telescope, designed to facilitate groundbreaking astronomical and cosmological research

What was submitted for the award was apparently an article and a video published in December 2021:

The Webb Space Telescope Will Rewrite Cosmic History. If It Works. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-nasas-james-webb-space-te...

How NASA’s Webb Telescope Will Transform Our Place in the Universe https://www.quantamagazine.org/videos/james-webb-documentary...

Well earned, bravo! To me, Quanta truly stands out in terms of explaining complex matter not just to anybody but also in an entertaining way. I'd subscribe to it if there were a print version.

They make high quality explanatory videos, too! Their video on the Riemann hypothesis is a true gem.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlm1aajH6gY

And it's free! I'm very grateful for Quanta. It filled a gap in my life after my old favorite for decades, Scientific American, went off the rails and is now unreadable.

> And it's free!

Because the magazine is owned by a billion-dollar hedge fund and doesn't need to worry about turning a profit every quarter.

This is well earned. Congratulations!!

I didn’t know the Pulitzer had an ELI5 category

I know you are kidding, but Quanta is not ELI5. It's more like ELI am a college graduate, at least, with a very strong interest in math and physics, intense focus, and a willingness to deploy that focus.

Helpfully it's in the category name, "Explanatory" Reporting.

I don't like Quanta. They always try to explain some super specific cutting edge new stuff that nobody has any context for and it results in fake understanding. It's an aesthetic of understanding, science porn if you will. There should be way more pop science stuff that would explain old (decades or centuries old) concepts to the lay public instead of the hottest new thing of the day, where the incentives are huge to overhype for career reasons. "News" don't mix well with science.

> There should be way more pop science stuff that would explain old (decades or centuries old) concepts to the lay public instead of the hottest new thing of the day

While I agree that there needs to be more easily accessible science articles that are still pertinent today, I didn’t get the impression that that’s what Quanta was going for. Their target audience isn’t necessarily the lay public but instead someone who is comfortable in this space and has more than a passing knowledge.

My point is that there is room for both - something “hard to chew” like Quanta and something more “pop”.

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