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Comment by kspacewalk2 | Hacker News Reader

My thesis supervisor used excessively flowery language like that in papers, and I had to have a few tugs with him over needless verbosity all while learning to write a paper for the first time. I think there's a subconscious "look at how wise I am" whiff that comes off this type of writing. And sure, yes, impressive, but let's leave creative writing to creative writers. As a scientist, you should instead be focusing on communicating a (probably complex enough) idea as clearly and as simply as you possibly can - just not any simpler.

By the time I wrote my thesis, I was far more assertive in politely declining many of his edits.

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When I was a research fellow in anesthesiology, my supervisor constantly made edits that seemed to me unnecessary, almost as if he felt it was required of him to demonstrate his mastery.

After he changed something I'd revised per his instructions back to my original copy I decided I'd had enough: I revised only where I thought it improved the papers and ignored the rest.

He never said a thing.

I wrote an article for an early Java dev website thinking I might do that more professionally. I don’t know what crawled up the editor’s butt, but he kept suggesting edits that took sentences I sweated over to be precise and basically edited them to say either nothing at all or the opposite of what I meant. My last round of edits I sent to him came with my own comments about why things needed to stay worded a certain way, because I thought he was trying to make me sound like an idiot - not plain-speaking but plain wrong.

It was exhausting and stupid and I stuck to blogging after that. Who knows, I might have written books. But not dealing with shit like that. I can torture myself much more efficiently, TYVM.

self-publishing books... just sayin

I was always on the fence about whether I had enough to say to fill a book. It's more that the experience made me stop asking the question.

> my supervisor constantly made edits that seemed to me unnecessary, almost as if he felt it was required of him to demonstrate his mastery.

There are many stories of savvy workers engaging proactively including a flaw in their work being reviewed, something small but obvious and easy to fix, so that their managers can feel involved. One that often comes up in software is an apocryphal "duck" in an unreleased attack animation for the queen-unit in Interplay's Battle Chess game.

Closely related are the appearance of changes, such as a tale that Michelangelo was pressured to "fix" the nose of his David statue, so he climbed up and knocked off a little bit of material and the superior down below was satisfied without being able to verify anything had really changed.

Also known as the hairy arm technique or a revision bait.

http://www.1099.com/c/co/in/insanity006.html

My English professors in college beat this kind of stuff out of the students. One went so far as to grade all papers that started with something like "since time immemorial, man has..." with an F.

The issue here is not so much that it’s flowery but that it’s completely unremarkable, bordering on a truism, in its content. The sentence literally means: sound is relevant because you constantly hear it.

The sentence is badly written, which is why it feels like a truism. But there is content in it.

> Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, ...

Sounds are always being heard by your senses: ears + bass that you feel in your body.

> Sound ... continually engages our auditory and mental faculties.

The continuous usage of our senses then lets sounds force our brains to think in particular ways. This is distinct from above - brain vs ears.

> Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience ...

The continuous engagement results in sound being important to what being human means. Note that human experience is larger than what you think. So this is also distinct from above.

I’m sorry but you have taken a lot of words to basically say: you hear sounds.

Special mention to “ Sound ... holds significant relevance in the human experience” which is itself a truism in the truism. Yes, sound is an experience and experiencing is a significant part of being alive. You are welcome for this insanely new and deep nugget of information.

Honestly, you can remove the first paragraph of the introduction with no loss of information involved and end up with a better article.

I spent years implementing natural language processing papers and I learned to my incredible dismay most of them are incredibly simple and do their level best to hide this by writing the most impenetrable prose you can find. Sometimes I sincerely miss being a child and believing most people are doing their best and aren't fundamentally kind of shit.

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