Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by clnq | Hacker News Reader

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Thanks for the very interesting article. But man, is it filled with needlessly complex language.

> The upper gastrointestinal tract is well-endowed with taste and fat receptors, with sweet taste being detected, as elsewhere, by a heterodimer of the taste 1 receptor (T1R) family, T1R2/T1R3. These receptors have been localized to intestinal brush and enteroendocrine cells, and are coupled with α-gustducin as the α-subunit of the G protein (Fig. 1). They recognize sugars, d-amino acids, sweet proteins, and artificial sweeteners. Of importance to a possible role in the incretin response, these receptors are colocalized with glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) and L cells containing peptide YY (PYY) and K cells containing glucose-dependent insulinotropic polypeptide (GIP) (3). Incidentally, fatty acid responsive GPRs are also coupled to GLP-1 release, but are found predominantly in the colon (5).

Can be restated in plain English: Cells in the GI tract between one's mouth and duodenum have similar sweet taste receptors - T1R. Some of these cells are endocrine and store GLP-1, PYY, and GIP (incretin) messenger hormones.

For context, messenger hormones cause changes in cells receptive to them, including the nervous system. Indirectly, these hormones can affect metabolism and feeling of hunger or fullness (this is not in the paper but is known).

The paper then discusses inconsistent (but meaningful) evidence for sweet taste receptors influencing the messenger hormone release and insulin-glycemia response. Notably, the author suggests sucralose sweeteners consumed before carbohydrates might spike postprandial (after-meal) blood sugar and insulin response. However, the extent of this effect could depend on an individual's genetics. The link between messenger hormone release and sweet taste receptors is established because this effect is diminished in vivo in mice lacking specific sweet taste receptors.

So HN, where’s that browser plug-in wrapping that GPT-3 prompt “Rewrite the following text in plain English that a ten year old could understand”, written in Rust?

ChatGPT:

> The upper part of your digestive system has lots of special cells that can taste things and sense fat. These cells have tiny helpers inside them called receptors, and when they taste something sweet, they send a message to your brain using a special chemical called alpha-gustducin. These receptors can also taste things like sugar, special proteins, and fake sweeteners. These cells also help your body make hormones that tell your pancreas to make more insulin when you eat something sweet. There are also other cells in the upper part of your digestive system that can sense fat, but they mostly live in the lower part of your digestive system.

It's not wrong. But it's not very right in conveying the essential parts of the article. For example, the fat and non-sweet protein sensing seems a bit adjacent to the author's point. I'm not sure why they went on these tangents.

It is of course well known that careless talk costs lives, but the full scale of the problem is not always appreciated. For instance, at the exact moment you said "Rewrite the following text in plain English that a ten year old could understand" a freak wormhole opened in the fabric of the space-time continuum and carried your words far far back in time across almost infinite reaches of space to a distant galaxy where strange and warlike beings were poised on the brink of frightful interstellar battle.

The two opposing leaders were meeting for the last time. A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl'Hurgs, resplendent in his black jewelled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G'Gugvunt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green, sweet-smelling steam. As a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, the Vl'Hurg challenged his vile enemy to take back what it had said about his mother.

The creature stirred in its sickly broiling vapour, and at that very moment the words "Rewrite the following text in plain English that a ten year old could understand" drifted across the conference table. Unfortunately, in the Vl'hurg tongue this was the most dreadful insult imaginable, and there was nothing for it but to wage terrible war for centuries. Eventually the error was detected, but over two hundred and fifty thousand worlds, their peoples and cultures perished in the holocaust.

You have destroyed most of a small galaxy. Please pick your words with greater care.

I'm not a biologist but that doesn't sound that complex for a science paper. Your average CS paper would have a similar level of complexity (if not worse)

Generally, I don't particularly appreciate how unreadable academic articles are. It makes them ineffective at communicating their ideas. And worse - there are a lot of pieces where jargon is used as a substitute for content.

Yes, it's not unexpectedly complex for a science paper. But like many academic papers, it is needlessly complex. As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.

I often wonder - would it be that difficult to present academic writings in simple English, or at least to provide a plain English abstract? Publishing a paper takes months; what're the extra 10 minutes to make it more effective and readable?

> As I've shown, you can mostly restate a technical paragraph with two plain English sentences.

You've taken a paragraph that contained a lot of details and was quite precise, and replaced it with wishy washy language. For example, they day that the cells they found are heterodimers of the T1R cells on your tongue, specifically T1R2/3. You replaced this precise explanation with the single word "similar", which could mean that they are enitrely different cells that are tautologically "similar" in also detecting sweet tastes.

They were also explaining exactly what the cells detect, which you thought is not worthy of mention.

The single short clear phrase "upper GI tract" you replaced with the longer and more akward "the part of the GI tract between the mouth and the duodenum".

Overall, your phrase would sound more complex and awkward to a practitioner, and you have reduced the information significantly. There is a reason technical language is used in technical papers - it allows you to be concise, information dense, and precise.

Who do you think the audience is for the papers published in academic journals? I imagine the intended audience is their peers and therefore the precise, unambiguous language is much more effective at conveying the ideas. Jargon exists for a reason, it isn't invented in a vacuum.

If the audience is the layperson, then of course you are right. The ideas being expressed will be completely lost upon the audience because they won't understand half the terminology used. But I suspect you might be in the minority if you think academic journals are intended to have an audience that broad.

But removing all the details and jargon that the lay person might not understand isn't even the right way to go about making the jounal articles more comprehensible to a general audience. That thows away most of the information.

I am definitely in the minority, but let's not appeal to the masses. Excessive jargon is becoming more and more unwelcome in academia as readers and reviewers are getting tired of insubstantial jargon-padded papers bordering fraud. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of jargon in communication is now generally better comprehended. For example, jargon makes the articles difficult to consume for non-English speakers, enthusiast audiences, practitioners of applied science, and academics in different domains of research. There is a small counter-culture forming that embraces the value of effective plain English communication in research and I am a part of it.

Of course, I appreciate the value of jargon where it is necessary to convey meaning. Although Wikipedia has shown us plain English often conveys the entire meaning and details just fine, making jargon superfluous.

This paper, however, isn't the best example of jargon abuse. Some phrasing in it triggered me and I've reacted too strongly. Overall, it is relatively well-written.

More thoughts from another simple English advocate like me - http://www.paulgraham.com/simply.html

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