Academic writing

Hopefully it goes the way of 3d tvs but it won't.

Corporations are to invested

Oh don't even get me started about french philosophers - philosophy in general is very guilty of this, but french are absolutely the worst. Entire books of complete jargon where the point seems to be to sound as fancy as possible without as little content as possible

He said it's hard to see through the style of their writing because they use fancy language related to their field of work and it causes a vicious cycle of other people doing the same while excluding normal people.

Academia is usually about minutiae, not concepts. Sometimes they get so hyperfocus in small areas that they are completely unable to give a general summary of what they are doing in the bigger picture. To do so would require them to understand things outside of their very narrow field of study.

I don't expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they're actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can't. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.

As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.

This is why I believe scientists should be required to take liberal arts classes; especially related to written and spoken language. Trying to read a scientific paper as an outsider is painfully hard because you're trying to understand what the Big Words are trying to say, but then the paper also takes a borderline meandering path that loops back on itself or has sections that mean nothing, leaving you (or at least, me) confused. Like, c'mon man, I'm trying to understand what you're saying, but your narrative is more convoluted than House of Leaves.

How can you expect to truly make a breakthrough in science if you struggle to accurately and precisely convey your ideas to your peers? Study the great writers so your papers can have great writing and results.

If it helps, try doing it from a scientific perspective - as if you're studying a brand new creature or property of physics - and make notes on things like,

How the author expresses their ideas.

Was the author easily understandable?

What, if anything, made it easier or harder for you to understand what was written?

What elements made the writing more precise, concise and/or accurate to what the author was trying to convey (using outside sources)?

...and so forth.

(And yes, I also think liberal arts students should be required to take some level of hard STEM classes (not watered-down "libarts-compatible" stuff, but actual physics, chemistry, biology, etc) as well.)

Edit: you might even end up with a reputation for being more intelligent than you actually are, simply because you're able to convey your ideas significantly better than your peers.

Edit 2: or alternatively, study a programming language until you're decent at it, and then write your papers as if you're trying to explain them to a computer.

A big reason why newspapers use so many filler-phrases and redundancy and just don't get to the point is because journalists often get paid for how much they write; The consequence is obviously: filler-words.

Getting paid for "how much they write" may be implicit. For example, the boss might look at what the employees produce and say "ok this employee is good because they wrote 30 pages, this employee is bad because they wrote only 5". Even though they might get a fixed salary/month, the one that writes few pages might get fired.

Every single word in the original post clarifies more than plain English. It is more specific and has better nuance than a plain translation.

That doesn't make it a useful explanation because the audience of the statement is not the in-group using the jargon.

One part of my daily job is translating "technical" into "manager". The translation always loses fidelity to the original. Jargon exists because it's useful, not because there's a deliberate attempt to keep others out. Some will then use it as a shibboleth but that does not mean it's original purpose was such.

For what it's worth: that's true of all translations. I've done real time translation from Italian into English and it's always missing the nuance of the original. I've read the divine comedy in English and Italian and the English is always missing the context and nuance.

Language is an abstract representation of concepts and never maps faithfully.

And then you have multiple identical abbreviations meaning different things or different things that are pronounced the same or multi billion dollar ompanies naming their product after existing words (like Microsoft Word or Office or Outlook...).

Mix in abbreviated customer names, names for servers and internal teams (no, not Microsoft Teams©) and everything is only an incomprehensible letter mumbo-jumbo.

And you can't out yourself because, in many workplace cultures, the appearance of knowing is more important than actually knowing. :/

My argument is not against naming things after the discoverer, though in engineering while we have some of this (Heaviside comes to mind), most other concepts have a semantic value so even unknown terms can be mapped fairly easily.

My main argument is that math is taught very poorly, if we had taught math as the history of math in school, this would be far more meaningful, we understand it as a story and each piece in the puzzle an event that brought it about.

Oh i would say "ring" is in fact quite a descriptive term.

Apparently, in older german, "ringen" meant "to make progress of some sort/to fight for something". And a ring has two functions: addition and multiplication. These are the foundational functions that you can use to construct polynomials, which are very important functions. You could look at functions as a machine where you put something in and get something out.

In other words, you put something into a function, the function internally "makes some progress", and spits out a result. That is exactly what you can do with a "ring".

So it kinda makes sense, I guess.

I've been learning crypto math the hard way, it's brutal.

I've found one way that works is to learn about the people, like learn about Gauss's life and work, it helped give me context and perspective for the random terms.

It's even worse, math uses arcane terms for things that in many other fields are basically just accepted.

Galois fields? In hardware and software, those are just normal binary unsigned integers of a given bit length.

I get that GFs came about first, but when they were later implemented for computers they weren't usually (they are sometimes, mostly for carry less mul specifically, or when used for cryptography) called Galois fields, the behavior was just accepted as the default for digital logic.

I think any scientist should able to convey at least the high level concepts that they're working on at the level that a smart 12th-grader can follow. If you can't do that, I think that's a sign that you're probably not thinking about your work very clearly. Being able to distill things and context-switch back to a birds-eye view of your work is critical for knowing what direction you're heading in.

(I say this from the perspective of a climate scientist - our field has a pretty active public/lay conversation and lots of science comma, but I think the concept still applies to other sciences, and social sciences.)

Translation: “I’m a pretentious, condescending prick.”

and that they're not the people doing the research itself...

I don't think that's relevant. People like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have also done great at explaining science to the general public.