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Comment by largbae | Hacker News Reader

> We tried to take advantage of Richard's talent for clarity by getting him to critique the technical presentations that we made in our product introductions. Before the commercial announcement of the Connection Machine CM-1 and all of our future products, Richard would give a sentence-by-sentence critique of the planned presentation. "Don't say `reflected acoustic wave.' Say [echo]." Or, "Forget all that `local minima' stuff. Just say there's a bubble caught in the crystal and you have to shake it out." Nothing made him angrier than making something simple sound complicated.

I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.

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For a while, I worked for a physicist who resembled Feynman in many of his beliefs and behaviors. He once told me about how he changed his writing style over time. In his early papers, he would cite poorly understood theories while assuming that the reader understood them. At that time, he was exhibiting "academic arrogance" and basically looking down upon anybody who could not understand his work. After teaching for a while, he changed his style to use well-understood terms and theories. He had realized that his papers would be more valuable if more people understood them.

We are still in touch, and have learned much from each other.

1. In academia, you need to be exact. You can't use vernacular words with many interpretations. You need to describe as precisely as possible your hypothesis, the methods you used to test it, and your results. Jargon avoids ambiguity.

2. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate it to general audiences. It's to describe, in detail, a study you performed so that others can attempt to reproduce it. The audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the same field. Communication of the results to a general audience is another matter.

I think the quote implies that Feynman's suggested changes were for marketing materials. It turns out myself and my colleagues were the intended targets of those marketing materials. We ignored them and just benchmarked the system.

In the end none of it mattered because it was next to impossible to achieve significant fractions of the quoted "peak" performance for real world/non-embarrassingly parallel algorithms. Especially with the CM-2 and 64 bit floating point.

Yes, I believe it was, but OP was specifically addressing academia:

> I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.

Where were you working at the time?

NASA Ames NAS.

1. I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.

2. If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.

>I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.

Yes, exactly. I was specifically referring to publishing, because OP was specifically referring to publishing:

> I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.

> If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.

I never said to not ever cater to general audiences. I said that catering to general audiences is not the purpose of a research paper. Separation of concerns. Communication to general audiences is still necessary and worthwhile.

In fact, there's a feedback loop between science, technology, and capital. Not communicating results from academia breaks or reduces the effectiveness of this feedback loop. So, yes, you are absolutely correct that academic papers should be communicated to general audiences.

There were some recent studies on lawyers and "legalese" that suggests people are making things hard to understand on purpose for social reasons: https://news.mit.edu/2024/mit-study-explains-laws-incomprehe...

You are a wanker.

My favorite is in nutrition research papers when they say something like "At 8am the subjects consumed a standardized breakfast"

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