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The 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Explanatory Reporting

305 points by danso 4y ago

danso 4y ago
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-telescope-matters-so-much-20211203/ 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/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/videos/james-webb-documentary...
melling 4y ago
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/073521798X 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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)
- polytely 4y ago
  There is a Numberphile interview with him that I remember being pretty interesting https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0 https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0
- guerby 4y ago
  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"
  - nojito 4y ago
    Even with accounting for that change RenTec’s returns don’t change all too much.
    - caminante 4y ago
      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.
      - nojito 4y ago
        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.
  - jcranberry 4y ago
    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.
  - jgalt212 4y ago
    Simons may be the biggest tax cheat in US History.
- josu 4y ago
  I am big fan of Jim Simon's work as well as Quanta, really interesting that both are connected.
- mjreacher 4y ago
  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).
  - melling 4y ago
    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.
    - magnio 4y ago
      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.
      - tgb 4y ago
        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.
    - etrain 4y ago
      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-the-early-years https://vator.tv/news/2017-09-05-when-blue-apron-was-young-t...
- erk__ 4y ago
  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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVDqfUhXOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVDqfUhXOY
AlphaGeekZulu 4y ago
This is well earned. Congratulations!!
fortran77 4y ago
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.
- gaws 4y ago
  > 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.
kurupt213 4y ago
I didn’t know the Pulitzer had an ELI5 category
- geophile 4y ago
  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.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- moritonal 4y ago
  Helpfully it's in the category name, "Explanatory" Reporting.
picardo 4y ago
They make high quality explanatory videos, too! Their video on the Riemann hypothesis is a true gem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlm1aajH6gY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlm1aajH6gY
edding4500 4y ago
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.
bonoboTP 4y ago
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.
- timcavel 4y ago
- pixelatedindex 4y ago
  > 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”.
DantesKite 4y ago
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 https://youtu.be/Q2u0dKRA1cA
- belter 4y ago
  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/Renaissance-s-Medallion-Fund-Surged-76-in-2020-But-Funds-Open-to-Outsiders-Tanked https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1q3fndg77d0tg...
  - next_xibalba 4y ago
    My naive guess? Incentives. Their institutional fund, which at one point was claimed to be capable of managing $100B, is also a dog.
  - yread 4y ago
    And with 1.9% fees!
- Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
- makeset 4y ago
  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.

305 points by danso 4y ago

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-telescope-matters-so-much-20211203/ 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/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/videos/james-webb-documentary...

melling 4y ago

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/073521798X 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) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Simons_(mathematician)

polytely 4y ago
There is a Numberphile interview with him that I remember being pretty interesting https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0 https://youtu.be/QNznD9hMEh0
guerby 4y ago
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"
- nojito 4y ago
  Even with accounting for that change RenTec’s returns don’t change all too much.
  - caminante 4y ago
    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.
    - nojito 4y ago
      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.
- jcranberry 4y ago
  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.
- jgalt212 4y ago
  Simons may be the biggest tax cheat in US History.
josu 4y ago
I am big fan of Jim Simon's work as well as Quanta, really interesting that both are connected.
mjreacher 4y ago
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).
- melling 4y ago
  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.
  - magnio 4y ago
    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.
    - tgb 4y ago
      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.
  - etrain 4y ago
    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-the-early-years https://vator.tv/news/2017-09-05-when-blue-apron-was-young-t...
erk__ 4y ago
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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNznD9hMEh0 [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVDqfUhXOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjVDqfUhXOY

AlphaGeekZulu 4y ago

This is well earned. Congratulations!!

fortran77 4y ago

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.

gaws 4y ago
> 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.

kurupt213 4y ago

I didn’t know the Pulitzer had an ELI5 category

geophile 4y ago
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.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
moritonal 4y ago
Helpfully it's in the category name, "Explanatory" Reporting.

picardo 4y ago

They make high quality explanatory videos, too! Their video on the Riemann hypothesis is a true gem. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlm1aajH6gY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlm1aajH6gY

edding4500 4y ago

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.

bonoboTP 4y ago

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.

timcavel 4y ago
pixelatedindex 4y ago
> 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”.

DantesKite 4y ago

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 https://youtu.be/Q2u0dKRA1cA

belter 4y ago
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/Renaissance-s-Medallion-Fund-Surged-76-in-2020-But-Funds-Open-to-Outsiders-Tanked https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b1q3fndg77d0tg...
- next_xibalba 4y ago
  My naive guess? Incentives. Their institutional fund, which at one point was claimed to be capable of managing $100B, is also a dog.
- yread 4y ago
  And with 1.9% fees!
Bubble_Pop_22 4y ago
makeset 4y ago
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.