Daunting papers/books and how to read them
mathoverflow.net
mathoverflow.net
There was a time this has been the case. How far we have come. Relevant: https://amp.theguardian.com/science/2013/dec/06/peter-higgs-...
That said, I have much more time and patience then when I was in school which also helps immensely.
It seems inevitable that the theoretically infinite world of math will be finitely bound by the limits of the human mind. There’s only so much time in one lifespan to do all the pre-reading.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/11/09/ars-longa-vita-brevis/
> [...] If a book bores you, leave it; don’t read it because it is famous, don’t read it because it is modern, don’t read a book because it is old. If a book is tedious to you, leave it, even if that book is 'Paradise Lost' — which is not tedious to me — or 'Don Quixote' — which also is not tedious to me. But if a book is tedious to you, don't read it; that book was not written for you. Reading should be a form of happiness, so I would advise all possible readers of my last will and testament—which I do not plan to write— I would advise them to read a lot, and not to get intimidated by writers' reputations, to continue to look for personal happiness, personal enjoyment. It is the only way to read.”
Anyway, being science/academic books/papers the point of discussion in the thread, I doubt one would always have the privilege to just leave it.
1. Journals have length limits. And readers don't read long papers at all.
2. Many academics have not worked hard enough to attain excellent writing skills - they were too busy becoming excellent at their discipline.
The most important reason.
- Given a clear lucid explanation of new knowledge that no one but you know, is incredibly difficult. Honestly, anyone, who thinks it's easy should take a stab at undertaking a research project and then trying to summarize months or years of work into 6-10 pages.
Of course, standards vary significantly institution to institution and even person to person, and highly technical, skilled people are not indicative of full capability of reading, let alone reviewing the topic, doubly so when it is original research.
It has the odd effect of making this stuff comprehensible only to those that essentially already know what it is, and possibly a few people academically adjacent to those people.
Other people can decipher it, after long and arduous labor, but it essentially requires rediscovering the path that brought it about, knowing what the outcome will be. In that sense these papers are less useful than they seem.
Academia is a little like religion: to outsiders the language and rituals make little sense, only those indoctrinated in its tenets can achieve enlightenment.
If you talk about a modern city with a hunter gatherer, how many words would you have to explain? Do these words exist because modern life is "like a religion" and hunter gatherer is not "indoctrinated"?
That said, conveying an idea in an easily understandable way is hard and some authors will do better or worse than others. Also papers will usually not purely present the new idea but provide some context so that the reader only needs to be familiar with the topic up to the context but the amount of context given will vary a lot between papers.
Even if you study textbooks, which themselves suffer the same fate, requiring other textbooks or knowledge of terms and notation as prerequisites, and have knowledge in the field it doesn't mean you can understand most papers. Fields and subfields have their own (obscure) terminology and notation, often individual practitioners do. Even if they don't terminology and notation isn't used consistently, which becomes critical when you're trying to learn and understand.
I'm just lamenting how inscrutable this knowledge is and how sad and frustrating that is. Most of this stuff is not that complicated once you know what they're actually talking about. Instead you end up banging your head against the wall for hours trying to divine the intent of the author or go on endless yak shaving expeditions trying to nail down terms and concepts.
The answer in most of academia is: not at all. You're expected to have learnt everything in the field up to that point. Academia is for academics and generally doesn't care about impact outside of academia, who seldom understand it anyway (because of its academic nature).
So if you want the knowledge, you go in knowing this. If you don't want the knowledge that much, wait until it becomes a popular topic and people make books or blogs about it.
Important topics that are read by many people get rewritten into textbooks that are very easy to read compared to the original papers, but people complain a ton about those textbooks as well so there is no way to placate people like you here, no matter how hard they try people demand them to try harder.