13 ms·

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sen

Last thing I saw was "The son of two high school English teachers, Pontzer grew up on 40 hectares of woods in the Appalachian bla bla bla..." You know that sentence. So many articles have that sentence. The one where it veers off course to talk about the (usually uninteresting) person who found the thing the article is ostensibly and nominally about. Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the duration of an article, and not particularly caring about the scientist and what breed of dog he has etc.?

tpoacher 5y ago
I had a very similar outburst recently :p https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344510
hwers 5y ago
This is a reason we shouldn't feel ashamed about developing a habit of skimming. In many cases it's simply a proper adaption to an incredibly low signal to noise ratio in most articles you're exposed to on the internet.
- gima 5y ago
  Props to this. I have developed a habit of skipping to the end of the whole page, and reading towards the beginning, paragraph-by-paragraph. Works..sometimes :D
periheli0n 5y ago
You could read his papers if you're only interested in the science?
joeld42 5y ago
There are different kinds of articles out there. Some are about getting the information across, some give the context and the story behind it. Some aren't even about the science at all. I wouldn't compare John McPhee to a Geology textbook. And I wouldn't say it's correct that this article was "ostensibly and nominally" about just calories. The headline is "Scientists bust myths about calories". It's about the scientists as much as it is about the calories. Anyways, that's all to say, I do enjoy articles like this that give context and explain not just the research but the people behind it. Let people enjoy things.
aulin 5y ago
I'm really having a hard time reading this. They lost me even before, when they said he likes hiking and he's not fat. Good science can come from the worst people. Show me the data, no need to sell me the authors.
onion2k 5y ago
Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the duration of an article, and not particularly caring about the scientist and what breed of dog he has etc.? science.org is like a good quality popsci magazine. People read it for the science, but also for entertainment. The aim is to make science engaging to non-scientists. If you just want the science then you should be heading to Nature or Arxiv.
- periheli0n 5y ago
  Actually, both Nature and Science call themselves 'magazines', and they have plenty of pop-science-compatible content, mixed with primary literature. Arxiv needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt because much of the content is not peer-reviewed.
jdrc 5y ago
Yes there is a name i think for that rambling on with insignificant details about the person At best it should be seen as a warning for possible biases in the science due to the person's background or upbringing, or random life anecdote.
tomerv 5y ago
I hate that, and I usually just skip that part. No point fighting it, I guess.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
raldi 5y ago
Right? Can someone just list the myths and their refutations so I can move on with my life?
Lio 5y ago
You’re not alone. This reads like one of Grandpa Simpson’s stories about onions. I also like the way they’ve broken my browser’s reader mode too. I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2 paragraphs of articles like this. If there’s no actual content there then move on without reading.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  Thats generally what I do, I skip to the last paragraph, read it, and if I've missed any important context (that I care about of course), I go up one, rinse and repeat until I get the point they're making, or until I get bored and decide I can quite happily live my life without knowing the busted myths
Dinux 5y ago
I was thinking the exact same thing. I stopped reading after three sentences and couldn't find the scientific paragraph right away so I just when to the HN comment section to see if some could give me the gist of the story. Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its my take that no one really cares about who ate what this morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing
- aembleton 5y ago
  I think they're written this way for seo optimisation.
  - oblio 5y ago
    That's funny. SEO optimization for keywords "woods" and "Appalachians"? :-) No, it's written that way to turn the person into a) a character, b) a relatable character. Regular people like stories, not dry facts piled up.
    - iainmerrick 5y ago
      Isn’t it mainly to provide more space for ads?
      - oblio 5y ago
        Probably a bit of both.
KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago
I didn't know this about myself, but apparently I feel the same because I exited there after finding out very little about the claim in the title of the article.
playpause 5y ago
No you’re not alone in it. But yes there are plenty of us who find it a really effective way to get drawn into an article. It works for me through infectious enthusiasm. If I have a sense of a curious mind trying to figure something out, I get interested in the thing they’re trying to figure out too. Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything made me interested in tons of scientific areas I never considered interesting before, because it is all about fascinating people repeatedly failing then eventually succeeding in understanding some natural phenomenon. The human angle is the perfect gateway for me. Maybe if I had more discipline I could just force myself to start reading a dry, factual scientific article in a field of little immediate interest to me until I start to notice data points that pique my own curiosity. But it’s so much easier for me to get infected with the curiosity of some compelling character who is overflowing with it. And it sticks better in the memory. If it’s a field I already have a strong personal interest/background in, then I generally just want to get straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn’t read a long form popsci article like this one. But calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that’s not very exciting, yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit), so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.
- Hendrikto 5y ago
  > Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything I have read that book multiple times, first when I was 10. It left a huge impression on me. I heartily recommend it. Bill Bryson in general is a great author. One of my favorites.
michalu 5y ago
Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science. The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's why we develop strength, endurance etc. And that's why when you're truly doing sports you're running more, faster, lifting more, etc. you increase the challenge to give your body greater burden to carry. If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight. You have that same thing in other disciplines - "historians" who can't make any meaningful contribution yet want to make name for themselves go on claiming "that or that king was gay" or "vikings were trans" or whatever fits the trending topics of the day and they get media exposure.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 1_player 5y ago
  > What's so controversial about it? Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about. Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles because you had a portion of fries. There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because muscles are expensive to maintain, but again, if you want to lose weight eating one less portion of fries is easier and takes less time than going for a 5 mile run. > body optimizes for energy expenditure No that's wrong, it optimises for energy maintenance. Genetically it's better to maintain fat and survive the next famine, than burning all the energy today. Which is why the body is so efficient at _not_ losing weight unless it has no other choice to maintain homeostasis. And thus to lose fat, we need to preferably eat less, not run more. Do both, and you'll do great.
  - jeltz 5y ago
    While I agree with that excerice isn't a very efficient way to lose weight I think that you understate how many calories running burns. When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).
kwhitefoot 5y ago
Could machine learning could help with this? Could some algorithm be created to strip the padding from such articles just leaving the useful stuff?
- jeffreygoesto 5y ago
  No. If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch cargo cult on top.
  - Avalaxy 5y ago
    You're wrong, it is very well possible with algorithms, and it has been a thing for many years already. For example check the Auto TLDR bot for Reddit. Here's an example of what it could look like for the article posted here: https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why#&SM_LENGTH=7 https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/sc... It's not even hard to do, you mostly have to count token frequencies which is hardly machine learning. Although you could also do it with BERT.
- bodge5000 5y ago
  Seems like a lot of work (and a lot of time to get working reliably) for a relatively minor issue that can be mostly fixed by skim reading
- Avalaxy 5y ago
  Yes. See https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why#&SM_LENGTH=7 https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/sc... for example.
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    Thank you! Works very well.
- fbanon 5y ago
  I would expect machine learning to be more useful in generating this kind of fluff.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
Paste bin copy with most of the fluff paragraphs removed: https://pastebin.com/LXtLkdgN https://pastebin.com/LXtLkdgN
jbotz 5y ago
Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive work? Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.
- oblio 5y ago
  HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about this and turn it into virtue signaling. "Look how bad I am at reading people." "I'm worse than you at..." "I'm so bad that..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE > Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
  - iainmerrick 5y ago
    Seems a bit harsh to jump right into an accusation of the dreaded virtue signaling! Would you agree at least that there’s a balance to be made, and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an avalanche of color)? I don’t want no color, but I agree with others here that many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards fluff these days. Online recipes are a more extreme example -- it’s increasingly hard to find the actual recipe these days. Titles matter. A title like “A Short History of Nearly Everything” pretty clearly tells you that there’s going to be a lot of storytelling. But if you have a clickbait title like “Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories”, you ought to deliver on those promised myth-busting new facts! I think it’s interesting to consider a) is this a real change; b) if so, is it driven more by culture or by technology? (i.e. by ads)
    - oblio 5y ago
      Most science articles I've seen, since times immemorial, provide some background for the researchers or the study subjects. At what point it becomes "too much fluff" or "padding for extra ads", I couldn't tell you, probably sites have article minimum word requirements to account for the second part.
mcv 5y ago
It would be nice if articles actually made use of the possibilities of the Web: show me just the brief summary of what it's about, and let me click links to choose whether to read more about the science, or more about the 40 hectares of woods where the guy grew up.
- periheli0n 5y ago
  You could go to the primary literature and read the abstracts.
thecleaner 5y ago
Skipped it totally. That's the part of scientific American intended for bored readers more interested in gossip. The part after it is quite cool. The conclusions are basically drawn from how much CO2 is exhaled. So the key contribution seems to be the data collection methods.
inglor_cz 5y ago
It is a genre. You may prefer drier style. On occassion, I do as well. But sometimes I enjoy fluffy writing like this, especially in the human-contact-starved covid days. I would say "live and let live". There is enough written content on the Web for everyone to find their niche.
beowulfey 5y ago
It’s maybe three paragraphs total of his life, then it’s back to the findings. I skipped those paragraphs too. The article is essentially a summation of Pontzer’s past decade or so of work (and I do find the work to be really interesting), so if you want just the meaty bits you can probably try reading the original papers.
abhinavm 5y ago
I hate this type of journalism. Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website. This type of journalism works well if the backstories are tied well together to the main story, and is done by a good writer. But when average writers do it, the stories are tedious, and hard to read.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website. It's not that. It also happens in written media. It's not just as filler either. They have the dellusion that this makes the story better...
coldtea 5y ago
It's apparently the canonical way all long story/articles have to be written. It's as if those people wanted to be authors instead of journalists...
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
cataphract 5y ago
I just skipped over that part...
d4rkp4ttern 5y ago
Indeed I find a lot of NYtimes articles are filled with fluff like this and I find myself skipping to the core info.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JeremyNT 5y ago
Yeah, this is a really strange article. It reads more like a human interest story about this one scientist's bio, with his work sprinkled in. I'm not a fan of this style of reporting. It can be interesting to learn about a person's life if the subject is especially notable, but given the headline it feels a little like a bait and switch.
jimmyvalmer 5y ago
Verbiage is proof of work, and journalists need to make a living, just the same as planning-to-plan product managers. You can train yourself to skim for maximal extraction per minute. I burned through the article in about 3-4 minutes. I tend to get bogged down by my software developer's close-reading instincts.

tpoacher 5y ago

I had a very similar outburst recently :p https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30344510

hwers 5y ago

This is a reason we shouldn't feel ashamed about developing a habit of skimming. In many cases it's simply a proper adaption to an incredibly low signal to noise ratio in most articles you're exposed to on the internet.

gima 5y ago
Props to this. I have developed a habit of skipping to the end of the whole page, and reading towards the beginning, paragraph-by-paragraph. Works..sometimes :D

periheli0n 5y ago

You could read his papers if you're only interested in the science?

joeld42 5y ago

There are different kinds of articles out there. Some are about getting the information across, some give the context and the story behind it. Some aren't even about the science at all. I wouldn't compare John McPhee to a Geology textbook. And I wouldn't say it's correct that this article was "ostensibly and nominally" about just calories. The headline is "Scientists bust myths about calories". It's about the scientists as much as it is about the calories. Anyways, that's all to say, I do enjoy articles like this that give context and explain not just the research but the people behind it. Let people enjoy things.

aulin 5y ago

I'm really having a hard time reading this. They lost me even before, when they said he likes hiking and he's not fat. Good science can come from the worst people. Show me the data, no need to sell me the authors.

onion2k 5y ago

Am I alone in being perfectly happy reading about science for the duration of an article, and not particularly caring about the scientist and what breed of dog he has etc.? science.org is like a good quality popsci magazine. People read it for the science, but also for entertainment. The aim is to make science engaging to non-scientists. If you just want the science then you should be heading to Nature or Arxiv.

periheli0n 5y ago
Actually, both Nature and Science call themselves 'magazines', and they have plenty of pop-science-compatible content, mixed with primary literature. Arxiv needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt because much of the content is not peer-reviewed.

jdrc 5y ago

Yes there is a name i think for that rambling on with insignificant details about the person At best it should be seen as a warning for possible biases in the science due to the person's background or upbringing, or random life anecdote.

tomerv 5y ago

I hate that, and I usually just skip that part. No point fighting it, I guess.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

raldi 5y ago

Right? Can someone just list the myths and their refutations so I can move on with my life?

Lio 5y ago

You’re not alone. This reads like one of Grandpa Simpson’s stories about onions. I also like the way they’ve broken my browser’s reader mode too. I was once advised to read the opening and the last 2 paragraphs of articles like this. If there’s no actual content there then move on without reading.

bodge5000 5y ago
Thats generally what I do, I skip to the last paragraph, read it, and if I've missed any important context (that I care about of course), I go up one, rinse and repeat until I get the point they're making, or until I get bored and decide I can quite happily live my life without knowing the busted myths

Dinux 5y ago

I was thinking the exact same thing. I stopped reading after three sentences and couldn't find the scientific paragraph right away so I just when to the HN comment section to see if some could give me the gist of the story. Many of these articles are written to increase volume, but its my take that no one really cares about who ate what this morning. Scientific papers often do the same thing

aembleton 5y ago
I think they're written this way for seo optimisation.
- oblio 5y ago
  That's funny. SEO optimization for keywords "woods" and "Appalachians"? :-) No, it's written that way to turn the person into a) a character, b) a relatable character. Regular people like stories, not dry facts piled up.
  - iainmerrick 5y ago
    Isn’t it mainly to provide more space for ads?
    - oblio 5y ago
      Probably a bit of both.

KnobbleMcKnees 5y ago

I didn't know this about myself, but apparently I feel the same because I exited there after finding out very little about the claim in the title of the article.

playpause 5y ago

No you’re not alone in it. But yes there are plenty of us who find it a really effective way to get drawn into an article. It works for me through infectious enthusiasm. If I have a sense of a curious mind trying to figure something out, I get interested in the thing they’re trying to figure out too. Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything made me interested in tons of scientific areas I never considered interesting before, because it is all about fascinating people repeatedly failing then eventually succeeding in understanding some natural phenomenon. The human angle is the perfect gateway for me. Maybe if I had more discipline I could just force myself to start reading a dry, factual scientific article in a field of little immediate interest to me until I start to notice data points that pique my own curiosity. But it’s so much easier for me to get infected with the curiosity of some compelling character who is overflowing with it. And it sticks better in the memory. If it’s a field I already have a strong personal interest/background in, then I generally just want to get straight to the findings, so in that case I wouldn’t read a long form popsci article like this one. But calories/diet/exercise stuff? For me that’s not very exciting, yet I do want to understand it better (for practical benefit), so anything that helps pique my curiosity in it is good.

Hendrikto 5y ago
> Bill Bryson’s Short History of Nearly Everything I have read that book multiple times, first when I was 10. It left a huge impression on me. I heartily recommend it. Bill Bryson in general is a great author. One of my favorites.

michalu 5y ago

Whenever there's insignificant science making "controversial" claims like "you can't lose weight with sport" journalist will provide storytelling instead of science. The whole premise of that "You can’t exercise your way out of obesity" is that you burn more calories when you start running than later on as you continue. What's so controversial about it? It's normal that body optimizes for energy expenditure that's why we develop strength, endurance etc. And that's why when you're truly doing sports you're running more, faster, lifting more, etc. you increase the challenge to give your body greater burden to carry. If I start lifting 20lbs and 3 years later I still lift that of course I won't lose weight. You have that same thing in other disciplines - "historians" who can't make any meaningful contribution yet want to make name for themselves go on claiming "that or that king was gay" or "vikings were trans" or whatever fits the trending topics of the day and they get media exposure.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
1_player 5y ago
> What's so controversial about it? Your body burns incredibly more energy just "being there" than you burn moving about. Exercise certainly increases your calorific expenditure, but it's much easier to ingest less fuel than to run 5 more miles because you had a portion of fries. There are benefits in exercise, apart from the obvious ones the raising of the baseline metabolic expenditure, because muscles are expensive to maintain, but again, if you want to lose weight eating one less portion of fries is easier and takes less time than going for a 5 mile run. > body optimizes for energy expenditure No that's wrong, it optimises for energy maintenance. Genetically it's better to maintain fat and survive the next famine, than burning all the energy today. Which is why the body is so efficient at _not_ losing weight unless it has no other choice to maintain homeostasis. And thus to lose fat, we need to preferably eat less, not run more. Do both, and you'll do great.
- jeltz 5y ago
  While I agree with that excerice isn't a very efficient way to lose weight I think that you understate how many calories running burns. When I run consistently I need to eat what feels like a lot more food to maintain my weight. Running burns about 700-800 kcal per hour for me (I have a quite small build) which ends up quite a bit over a week (I run 5-8 hours per week).

kwhitefoot 5y ago

Could machine learning could help with this? Could some algorithm be created to strip the padding from such articles just leaving the useful stuff?

jeffreygoesto 5y ago
No. If you want this to change, change the source, don't patch cargo cult on top.
- Avalaxy 5y ago
  You're wrong, it is very well possible with algorithms, and it has been a thing for many years already. For example check the Auto TLDR bot for Reddit. Here's an example of what it could look like for the article posted here: https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why#&SM_LENGTH=7 https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/sc... It's not even hard to do, you mostly have to count token frequencies which is hardly machine learning. Although you could also do it with BERT.
bodge5000 5y ago
Seems like a lot of work (and a lot of time to get working reliably) for a relatively minor issue that can be mostly fixed by skim reading
Avalaxy 5y ago
Yes. See https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/scientist-busts-myths-about-how-humans-burn-calories-and-why#&SM_LENGTH=7 https://smmry.com/https://www.science.org/content/article/sc... for example.
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  Thank you! Works very well.
fbanon 5y ago
I would expect machine learning to be more useful in generating this kind of fluff.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

Paste bin copy with most of the fluff paragraphs removed: https://pastebin.com/LXtLkdgN https://pastebin.com/LXtLkdgN

jbotz 5y ago

Am I alone on HN in being perfectly happy to get a bit of insight in the human nature of scientists doing impressive work? Seriously, yeah, some of this stuff may be fluff, but it does matter. Two scientists can be doing equally good work on a similar topic, but one's work makes headlines and the other's gets buried in some obscure journal and forgotten. Why? What can I do to be more like the former rather than the later? One popular magazine article may not give me that insight, but after a bunch of them patterns emerge.

oblio 5y ago
HN is both tech oriented, full of nerds and people with probably lower than average EQ and also an echo chamber in the sense that nerds at some point start geeking out about this and turn it into virtue signaling. "Look how bad I am at reading people." "I'm worse than you at..." "I'm so bad that..." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7wM0QC5LE > Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us
- iainmerrick 5y ago
  Seems a bit harsh to jump right into an accusation of the dreaded virtue signaling! Would you agree at least that there’s a balance to be made, and articles could lean either on the too-dry side (all facts and no color) or too-fluffy (facts buried in an avalanche of color)? I don’t want no color, but I agree with others here that many pop science articles seem to lean very heavily towards fluff these days. Online recipes are a more extreme example -- it’s increasingly hard to find the actual recipe these days. Titles matter. A title like “A Short History of Nearly Everything” pretty clearly tells you that there’s going to be a lot of storytelling. But if you have a clickbait title like “Scientist busts myths about how humans burn calories”, you ought to deliver on those promised myth-busting new facts! I think it’s interesting to consider a) is this a real change; b) if so, is it driven more by culture or by technology? (i.e. by ads)
  - oblio 5y ago
    Most science articles I've seen, since times immemorial, provide some background for the researchers or the study subjects. At what point it becomes "too much fluff" or "padding for extra ads", I couldn't tell you, probably sites have article minimum word requirements to account for the second part.

mcv 5y ago

It would be nice if articles actually made use of the possibilities of the Web: show me just the brief summary of what it's about, and let me click links to choose whether to read more about the science, or more about the 40 hectares of woods where the guy grew up.

periheli0n 5y ago
You could go to the primary literature and read the abstracts.

thecleaner 5y ago

Skipped it totally. That's the part of scientific American intended for bored readers more interested in gossip. The part after it is quite cool. The conclusions are basically drawn from how much CO2 is exhaled. So the key contribution seems to be the data collection methods.

inglor_cz 5y ago

It is a genre. You may prefer drier style. On occassion, I do as well. But sometimes I enjoy fluffy writing like this, especially in the human-contact-starved covid days. I would say "live and let live". There is enough written content on the Web for everyone to find their niche.

beowulfey 5y ago

It’s maybe three paragraphs total of his life, then it’s back to the findings. I skipped those paragraphs too. The article is essentially a summation of Pontzer’s past decade or so of work (and I do find the work to be really interesting), so if you want just the meaty bits you can probably try reading the original papers.

abhinavm 5y ago

I hate this type of journalism. Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website. This type of journalism works well if the backstories are tied well together to the main story, and is done by a good writer. But when average writers do it, the stories are tedious, and hard to read.

coldtea 5y ago
>Article writers are driven by metrics given to them by publishers. In this case, the metric they might be trying to optimise is time spent on the website. It's not that. It also happens in written media. It's not just as filler either. They have the dellusion that this makes the story better...

coldtea 5y ago

It's apparently the canonical way all long story/articles have to be written. It's as if those people wanted to be authors instead of journalists...

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

cataphract 5y ago

I just skipped over that part...

d4rkp4ttern 5y ago

Indeed I find a lot of NYtimes articles are filled with fluff like this and I find myself skipping to the core info.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

JeremyNT 5y ago

Yeah, this is a really strange article. It reads more like a human interest story about this one scientist's bio, with his work sprinkled in. I'm not a fan of this style of reporting. It can be interesting to learn about a person's life if the subject is especially notable, but given the headline it feels a little like a bait and switch.

jimmyvalmer 5y ago

Verbiage is proof of work, and journalists need to make a living, just the same as planning-to-plan product managers. You can train yourself to skim for maximal extraction per minute. I burned through the article in about 3-4 minutes. I tend to get bogged down by my software developer's close-reading instincts.