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Quanta articles are usually very good. I'm a scientist and I have been contacted by Quanta to fact-check their work before. They're very keen to make things as

Quanta articles are usually very good. I'm a scientist and I have been contacted by Quanta to fact-check their work before. They're very keen to make things as correct as possible. They also don't just write articles about theoretical physics, but about pretty much anything in science and math.

kergonath 2y ago
They are usually terrible, with just enough sciencey-sounding content to hook non-specialists with buzzwords, and way too much unwarranted sensationalism. How many times was Einstein proven wrong this week? They emphasise factoids with a very shallow context. Their focus on things that were proven or disproven completely hides the actual scientific work and the whole scientific method. Their headlines are most of the time garbage. I have the same feeling about that website as I have about the Big Bang Theory: it’s too truthy not to be dangerous, and at the same time utterly wrong in all aspects that matter. Both prey on their audiences’ Dunning-Kruger tendencies.
- eigenket 2y ago
  Thats a quite surprising view to me! Thats explicitly not what the Simons foundation set them up to do. I do agree that they are much shallower than the true scientific papers, but I would argue that that is pretty much necessary given their intended audience of non-experts. For people who want the true depth you can go and read the papers that Quanta bases their articles on, but for "normal" people I think most Quanta articles get pretty close to the optimal amount of depth you can give without completely losing the reader. I don't agree that they overly focus on things being proven or disproven - looking at their current front page, they have one article (this one) which uses those words. The article on the Hubble tension quite sensitively describes how the various measurements we have right now disagree, and I think shows quite nicely how the scientific work in progress is going. The article on tensors is (imo) fairly boring but certainly not overly sensationalist or buzzwordy. Basically without an example of an article that you think is really bad I don't really know what you're talking about, they're certainly not anywhere near to as bad as the big bang theory is (although I only ever watched one episode of that, so I can't talk about it properly).

kergonath 2y ago

They are usually terrible, with just enough sciencey-sounding content to hook non-specialists with buzzwords, and way too much unwarranted sensationalism. How many times was Einstein proven wrong this week? They emphasise factoids with a very shallow context. Their focus on things that were proven or disproven completely hides the actual scientific work and the whole scientific method. Their headlines are most of the time garbage. I have the same feeling about that website as I have about the Big Bang Theory: it’s too truthy not to be dangerous, and at the same time utterly wrong in all aspects that matter. Both prey on their audiences’ Dunning-Kruger tendencies.

eigenket 2y ago
Thats a quite surprising view to me! Thats explicitly not what the Simons foundation set them up to do. I do agree that they are much shallower than the true scientific papers, but I would argue that that is pretty much necessary given their intended audience of non-experts. For people who want the true depth you can go and read the papers that Quanta bases their articles on, but for "normal" people I think most Quanta articles get pretty close to the optimal amount of depth you can give without completely losing the reader. I don't agree that they overly focus on things being proven or disproven - looking at their current front page, they have one article (this one) which uses those words. The article on the Hubble tension quite sensitively describes how the various measurements we have right now disagree, and I think shows quite nicely how the scientific work in progress is going. The article on tensors is (imo) fairly boring but certainly not overly sensationalist or buzzwordy. Basically without an example of an article that you think is really bad I don't really know what you're talking about, they're certainly not anywhere near to as bad as the big bang theory is (although I only ever watched one episode of that, so I can't talk about it properly).