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Comment by carsongross | Hacker News Reader

It is depressing, but perhaps expected, that an article about a quantitative approach to historical analysis includes one anecdote and no additional data.

I was able to dig up this paper:

  http://www.pnas.org/content/111/26/9419.full

which is sufficiently dense to require some time to read and consider.

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Looks to me like nautil.us is aiming at a general readership that is interested in science. Many articles like this gloss over the numbers in favor of narrative and anecdotes, because that's what's interesting to general readership. The provides plenty of opportunity to delve deeper by seeking out the source material, as you have done.

There's many people, myself included who you could send the original paper and I'd give it a glance and probably leave it. Not because I'm stupid or uneducated, but because I don't even know if its a paper that says something new or relevant to the field or has something to offer me as a person. An article like this makes it much more likely that people will engage the research by giving me some initial sense.

Shouldn't the Nautil.us article simply have a reference (link enabled)? It's important for those of us who want to verify the analytical model and what inspired the ideas. For everyone else, it's a link they wouldn't click.

It's not exactly a new practice in the literary world.

But that doesn't fully explain it. There are other popular sites that do include charts and graphs. (Take Vox, Priceonomics, or FiveThirtyEight.) Perhaps this is a deliberate choice of the Nautil.us editors to appear more literary?

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