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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

Not the actual death of the magazine, just someone getting upset about lack of depth in an article. Specifically:

> "No, scientists haven’t created a wormhole using a quantum computer. They haven’t even simulated one. They simulated some aspects of wormhole dynamics under the crucial assumption that the holographic correspondence of the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model holds."

Quanta publishes great, detailed articles - but it's ultimately a general readership magazine, not an academic journal. I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don't have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I am disputing that this marks the "death" of the magazine.

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> I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model

But that's the problem. Most people don't understand the underlying science, so they rely on science journalism to distill and explicate complex topics without simplifying and distorting to the point they lose any relationship with the truth. In this case, the writer has failed in their task; they've written a load of nonsense that actively undermines a reader's ability to comprehend the topic—in short, it's bullshit.

I'm not disputing that the Quanta article is factually deficient - although I don't have the relevant specialist knowledge to understand why. I am disputing that this marks the "death" of the magazine.

Purely speaking for myself, but I could tell it was metaphorical. Given the "magazine" is still operating, and that I read some of the article.

A plain reading of the first four or five paragraphs doesn’t tell me that this is a calculation.

I meant that the magazine is not literally dead, but in the sense of "dead to me".

Not death of magazine. Correct.

But is the distinction between calculation and experiment really specialist knowledge?

This is not some "glossing over some details for a lay audience" situation. It is not a lack of depth. It makes ridiculous claims, fundamentally misrepresenting what this research is, to make it sound cooler and more interesting. This is one of the worst pieces of science journalism I've ever seen.

I agree. Every magazine and newspaper leaves a stinker occasionally. It's not the end of the world. The "it's dead to me because of this one bad article" standard will leave one with no magazines and no newspapers that are worthy.

More important, however, is that the OP's blog post (as I sense it), is actually mimicking hyperbolic attitude of the article it's complaining about. I suspect that Quanta is not "dead" to the author.

Is this his way of b-slapping the editors?

"Every magazine and newspaper leaves a stinker occasionally. It's not the end of the world."

May be not but just the same it's an overly-prevalent trend nowadays. For instance, New Scientist is notorious for hyping up stories that amount to little more than our current/general understanding of them—and or the Mag's cover stories or articles' headings are often outright misleading. New Scientist didn't do this decades ago (well, certainly not to the same extent).

Then there's the perennial problem of the sweeping statement without references or further explanation: new phenomena, complex processes etc. are just stated as if it was taken for granted that everyone already understands them in the way we understand, say, what a gram is. This is damn annoying as understanding the article hinges on actually understanding these skipped-over points.

It's not only New Scientist but others too including Quanta that engage in the practice but New Sc. is a past master at it. It seems to me the main reason for this is that the many journalists who engage in the practice don't actually understand the matter themselves and this is why they skip over such explanations (and or they're rewriting stories from press releases without first fully researching them, etc.).

Moreover, either editors are asleep at the wheel for allowing the practice and or they're under commercial pressures to print such crap—profit being more important than science news.

> I seriously doubt that many of it's readers have sufficiently deep knowledge of QC to properly understand the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model. Whatever that is.

The particular details aren't important; the problem is "model of X" is not the same as "X". In this case the model happens to be using a quantum computer, and X happens to be (some specific variety of) wormhole.

A couple of analogies:

Writing `new Particle { mass = 0; charge = 0; spin = 2; }` on a computer does not mean gravitons have been discovered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton

The UK cannot avoid an economic recession by pouring water into MONIAC https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC

Especially science magazines for the general public have a duty to be as factually correct as possible. This is not only a duty towards the general public, as they should not be deceived and deserve truthful reporting on these subjects. But it is also a duty towards the scientists, as they deserve that their results are presented fairly and accurately towards non-experts.

I have been generally impressed with quanta, as they usually try very hard (far more than most of their genre) to actually report accurately. Scientific reporting is hard, the knowledge gaps between reporter, scientists and audience are usually very large and explaining an extremely difficult concept to non-expert audience is very challenging. But this is no excuse to publish outright nonsense and to be honest publishing outright nonsense was not what I was expecting from quanta.

Please don't misrepresent the OP. The writer does not say he is "upset about lack of depth". His claim is that the Quantum article contains wildly false information.

Specifically, he claims a simulation was presented as an experiment.

> just someone getting upset about lack of depth

There’s a difference between a lack of depth and a fabrication.

> relevant specialist knowledge

It’s pretty simple to understand the gist of the problem: modelling something and actually creating it are different things.

> “death” of the magazine

The above notwithstanding, yes, one execrable article cannot kill a publication.

> It’s pretty simple to understand the gist of the problem: modelling something

I also think that there is a difference between modelling something, and sparsifying the model calculations so far that what you have left is 164 steps of 2-bit logic gate operations to a 9-bit register.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05424-3

Then leave the original paper as something only appealing to experts. Totally lying about it in order to make it more broadly appealing is pretty bad.

The paper is still there on the Nature website. I assume experts would go to that. Notwithstanding the difficiencies in the Quanta article, it does at least try to examine something that lay readers would otherwise probably not be aware of.

behind a paywall, neither available on arxiv nor scihub

“It falls so far below any journalistic standard that the magazine is dead to me.”

Author explains the “death” in the fifth sentence of the opening paragraph.

Quanta themselves also put out a few posts on their Mastodon account about how they've changed the wording, and about how they assign credibility: https://mstdn.social/@QuantaMagazine/109439420826151490

Blogpost uses clickbait and overblown reaction to complain about clickbait and overblown reporting.

Nobody (not even me) cares about the Sachdev–Ye–Kitaev model except a handful of scientists.

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