[SilasX]

I have to disagree. I don't like making people have to choose between the superficial "explains nothing" article and the "extremely opaque, academic" one. It's one of my biggest pet peeves, in fact, and adds an unnecessary barrier to onboarding people to new topics. I see it everywhere.

If you genuinely understand a topic, you can produce an explanation anywhere an between, and achieve any compromise between hand-wavy and substantive explanation. And anything that bridges the gap will make the next level of rigor easier.

[phoenixstrike]

I don't think we are in disagreement.

>Don't get me wrong, analogies and novel perspectives can be invaluable learning tools. But they can never be a substitute for the fundamentals, only supplement them.

[SilasX]

You are disagreeing, with this insistence that they should just take the hard slog through the ultra opaque academic paper, when a friendlier one can provide can communicate the critical parts of the model and the dynamics that drive the result.

You're disagreeing that the dynamics communicated by the intermediate paper can accomplish any relevant (thing that can be called) understanding because it's not "the fundamentals". In contrast, I insist that there are "blurrier" models that communicate something substantive without going all the way to the academic model.

[phoenixstrike]

Read the article and tell me specifically which parts of it communicate something substantive and critical that is also correct. Substantive communication of ideas or dynamics doesn't mean a thing if they are not accurate.

Propagation of false or incomplete ideas is more harmful than no communication at all (IMO).

It's no use to talk of all "intermediate" papers in general, as they are all different. Some are wildly successful at what you describe. I'm only talking about this one.

[Strilanc]

The article explains in substantive detail...

- How quadratic residues can factor a modulus.

- How to take a signal with peaks at k/P and derive P from a single sample.

- The general flow of modular-exponentiation to period-finding to quadratic residues to factoring.

But that's all mostly classical stuff that programmers would be expected to be able to follow in full detail. You're right that there is no focus on the fundamentals behind the QFT. Instead, there's a focus on concrete "if you do this, you get that" examples with links to a simulator to back up those assertions.

Some people learn best by starting with fundamentals. Others learn best by starting with examples. Most do a bit of both. It's inaccurate to call something "pop science" because it did some concrete-example-first explanation. Pop science articles don't have fundamentals or concrete examples. They just make joke analogies to Doctor Who or whatever and call it a day.

[SilasX]

Your original comment was categorically objecting to blurrier, intermediate pop-sci articles, not citing a problem with this specific one's failure to clarify the core dynamics driving the result. That all-or-nothing attitude is what I was objecting to.

I don't claim that this one succeeds at being a good intermediate paper, only that you shouldn't dismiss all such articles in preference for the ultra-rigorous one, as your original comment was suggesting.

If you think this one is failing to convey the key insights and/or worsens someone's understanding, then I would agree you should raise and elaborate on that point.