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Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

While one could argue that the abstract you linked is not well written, I do not think it’s obscurantist by any means. It’s a dissertation, so it’s not surprising they are using the jargon of the field and citing important works.

All academic literature is specialist literature. If you aren’t trained in the field you likely won’t understand it. It’s totally reasonable to me that a STEM person would have no idea what this abstract is saying just as a Humanities person probably couldn’t make heads or tails of the abstract of a dissertation on category theory or on a particular branch of computer science.

I find it funny that STEM folks always go after humanities academics for being obtuse when its just a matter of the pot calling the kettle black—dense STEM research and theory uses language that’d be considered equally obtuse to the untrained reader.

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To me, it goes beyond being hard to read, and I take it as obscurantist in the strictest sense of someone going out of their way to be hard to understand.

I have a theory that most STEM people simply don't think like most humanities people, literally at a neurological level. (I edited my post to add some thoughts around that, possibly after you replied.)

STEM work rarely comes off that way to me. The only time it looks to me like the person is going out of their way to be obtuse and technical, is some higher math stuff (which is a known thing and acknowledged even by some mathematicians). This includes the stuff from entirely different parts of STEM that I don't understand at all.

That’s fair. I would agree there is a certain “big words == more intellectual == smarter” or “more difficult == smarter” fallacy that arises somewhat frequently in contemporary humanities papers.

I think part of it might originate from the fact that the abstractions used for talking about things in the humanities aren’t fixed as well as they are in science. Take the abstract in question for example—the writer uses the palimpsest as a sort of visual analogue and abstraction to try to describe interactions and relationships between texts/narratives—while it’s not an absurd metaphor, it’s difficult to grok, because there is no real standardized metaphor for describing this set of relationships. You could argue the object of study isn’t as well defined as it is in the sciences where we have fairly standardized abstractions like “waveform” etc. that make it a lost easier to talk about things clearly.

I think that there is a thing called literary nonfiction which does use these higher level abstractions.

It might be that they are less fixed, as you say. That is a feature rather than a bug. It would take so much more text to describe everything literally than to use literary devices, which seem to be things that humans are really good at grasping. They are everywhere in film and TV but not everyone has experience naming them and referring to them in text at a meta level.

Imagine writing a symbolic AI in Go or C. There is a reason why people use Lisps and functional languages for very dense abstractions. They just do a lot of work, which some folks choose to deride as magic.

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