Academic writing is getting harder to read–the humanities most of all

I don’t agree with the thesis of this article at all. Yes, the abstracts have got more and more complicated. What about it? Human knowledge and discourse is simultaneously deepening and widening. Our own dot of knowledge is like a dot on a balloon. As the balloon expands, the dots go wider apart. Why should someone outside a field have the expectation of being able to understand anything they are saying, regardless of whether they are in the humanities or sciences? Esp. so in a PhD dissertation.

Here is the list of papers from STOC 2024, the premier conference on theory of computing.

https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2024/accepted-papers.html

I have a PhD in computer science, and I don’t understand a single line in any of the one line descriptions, let alone the abstract. It’ll be bizarre if I complain about my lack of understanding of STOC papers, or worse, that they should make it more accessible to us.

Why single out the humanities?