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Comment by dtech | Hacker News Reader

> The author even wrote the whole thing using “we” instead of “I”, which subtly gives the impression that a group of people collaborated to write this

Note, this is standard in the academic world, even if there is a single author. But it is a further way in which a phoney might mislead readers into thinking it is a credible academic paper.

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> Note, this is standard in the academic world, even if there is a single author.

This is true. It's awful writing. And there are many other indications of terrible writing in academic papers as well.

- The Royal We. We are not amused by the use of the Royal We in academic writing. Like much of the bad writing in academics, this probably was borrowed from bureaucratic style intended to diffuse and deflect. The right way to write a paper as a single author is to be honest to the reader. You are a single person: use "I".

- Official style. Reams of tirades have been written about passive voice, avoidance of responsibility ("experiments were done" instead of "I did the following experiments"), and longwinded gobbledygook.

- Weird use of tense. Academic authors jump between past, past perfect, and present tense with no justification, sometimes in the same sentence, particularly when moving from experiments to results to discussion.

- Backwards construction. This is particularly true with formalists. It's traditional in mathematics to start with fundamentals and slowly build towards your conclusion. But these same authors, when writing empirical or position papers, don't realize that this is awful construction in actual text.

- Horrible titles with little explanatory value. "On Foo" means "I wish to intimidate you with my knowledge on Foo". Words like "on", "towards", "an understanding", etc., should be banned entirely.

Academic authors don't know how to tell their story, how to make strong and concise arguments, or how to be convincing. Worse still, many think this is "how you do it". Why? Because their advisors, who were also awful writers, did it that way. Few of these people have ever been trained to be good writers. It's a self-sustaining cycle of mediocrity.

The point from this post that really resonated for me was pointing out that the author if the original paper, even while claiming that arguments should be based on merit and not on expertise or credentials, went out of their way to project that they had that expertise and those credentials. Its disingenuous.

He used We because his paper is open for PR and he was hoping to get contributions. He offered to change it and even put a disclaimer at the top.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23025809

If you'd like to submit a PR to the original paper you can totally do that and it'll be open for everyone to see. I may not agree with the author but I don't think attacking him is fair (on these points). Based on reading his comments he seems open to discourse and suggestions on his paper.

Note that he added the disclaimer later, after being called out [1] for making the specious argument that adding a disclaimer would be "too verbose".

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23030215

So he didn't think he needed a disclaimer, had a discussion around it, then added a disclaimer. That's exactly what I want from another human being. Someone who is open minded enough to have a discussion, opinionated enough to back up what they think, but in the end plyable enough to make an important change when they see it.

I might suggest you edit your post to include a nod to his disclaimer, as you've shown now that you know about it but don't mention it in your article.

I didn't include mention of the disclaimer because it wasn't in place when I saw the article in question, and I didn't link to the article because I don't think it deserves any more visibility.

Also, just looking at the comments on the original article, I don't think the author is open-minded or pliable, but that's just my .02.

But now you know, you could easily add an edit and an "This wasn't originally there but after being outted the author added it."

No I'm not saying link the paper, I was saying your HN link that's all.

Exactly, the author was not an academic, which at the very least means they are "putting on airs".

Is it possible that it still counts as "putting on airs" even when done by academics?

I had a long stint in academics as both a student and as research staff, and I noticed many instances of unchallenged self-aggrandizement within that community. I could easily believe this to be another instance of that, even if institutionalized.

Edit: FWIW I haven't looked into this history of this particular topic. There may a respectable explanation and I'm just ignorant.

In general this is done out of an appreciation that no work exists in a vacuum. "We", takes away from the individual and attributes the work to a group of people, even if they are not coauthors. I actually think this is one of the better conventions in academia.

Well it is also worth mentioning, the "we" can be used as a way to give a paper a conversational tone whilst still remaining formal. The "we" in that kind of case is the other domain experts reading the paper the author is assuming they are speaking to.

Reminded me of this "paper" https://ronbarak.tumblr.com/post/32266845480/how-to-write-a-...

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