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Comment by trevyn | Hacker News Reader

This seems inherently linked to the increase in complexity and precision of scientific ideas, particularly over the time scale investigated (back to 1881).

I certainly applaud efforts to manage this complexity (e.g. the article mentions possibly adding "lay person summaries" in addition to abstracts), but I think that increased complexity and depth of scientific results is the intended outcome.

It seems analogous to these insane computer-generated proofs in mathematics -- maybe we need new tooling and approaches to make sense of them, but the fact that they exist is proof that we're discovering things and moving forward.

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I don't buy that explanation - there's also just a lot of bad writing out there today. And, I'd wager, you'll find (more frequently than before) attempts to impress (and even obfuscate), rather then communicate and elucidate.

Note also that your hypothesis was briefly addressed in the article:

> An alternative explanation for the main finding is that the cumulative growth of scientific knowledge makes an increasingly complex language necessary. This cannot be directly tested, but if this were to fully explain the trend, we would expect a greater diversity of vocabulary as science grows more specialized. While accounting for the original finding of the increase in difficult words and of syllable count, this would not explain the increase of general scientific jargon words (e.g. 'furthermore' or 'novel', Figure 6B). Thus, this possible explanation cannot fully account for our findings.

Is "furthermore" scientific jargon? I thought it is just a professional version of "moreover". Like, I would say "moreover" to a friend, but write "furthermore" in a letter.

I had no idea that 'furthermore' or 'novel' are scientific jargon. I have seen that frequently enough to think it is normal English word. I would use furthermore in paper, because that was the word people seemed to be using all the time.

Eh. I'll definitely say that at least one of my favorite authors (as in, scientists) to read is being deliberately obscurantist about how he writes his papers. Or at the very least, he's using all his own vocabulary and terminology in each paper to push his favorite philosophical interpretation of his own work. This makes him extraordinarily difficult for other people in his field to understand, which actually means people don't engage with his ideas when they rightly should.

But he certainly gets to publish a lot with his own favorite colleagues and push his philosophy!

> This seems inherently linked to the increase in complexity and precision of scientific ideas, particularly over the time scale investigated (back to 1881).

I think that's a reasonable conclusion here. I mean medicine in that time frame seems to have gone from "Yeah just shelve some cocaine and your cough will go away" to MRI's so it makes sense that the research and results have gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.

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