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Comment by jeffparsons | Hacker News Reader

> My goal here is to develop an intuitive sense of comfort with the behaviors of these stacks. If I succeed, you will not just understand that the physics allows the stacks to be stable, but you will feel that it is proper and just.

I love this kind of writing. It feels like the author is excited to bring me along on a journey — not to show off how smart they are. In this way it reminds me of Turing's original paper that introduced his "computing machine". It presents a fantastically deep topic in a way that is not just remarkably accessible but also conversational and _friendly_.

I wonder why so little modern academic writing is like this. Maybe people are afraid it won't seem adequately professional unless their writing is sterile?

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It's really hard to achieve. It takes an awful lot of work and being able to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know everything you know.

A lot of writing suffers from the problem of "this explanation only makes sense if you already understand it", and I think it's the default - if the author is essentially explaining the problem to themselves, of course it makes sense to someone who already understands it.

The problem can be perpetuated when e.g. a lecturer sets recommended reading to students. From the lecturer's perspective the selected reading material has clear explanations (because the lecturer understands the subject well), but the students do not feel the same way.

As you say, this takes effort to overcome, both on the author's side and from anyone trying to curate resources - including what we choose to upvote on HN!

Sadly many Universities have lots of professors who just copy books in the blackboard. Those books that asume you already know.

Partially because Universities insist on making professors both teach and perform research (for the most part a few do have a real distinction between teaching and research but most still require at least a token class from most of their researchers) which isn't what most people go into a PhD program to do.

> Partially because Universities insist on making professors both teach and perform research

That alone would not be problematic. The real problem is that they insist on it, but only evaluate them on their research. That doesn’t create an incentive to spend time on getting better at teaching.

That's not universal, it factors in at some points at least at some universities, my wife is going through her reappointment after her first year as a professor at an R2 HBCU and teacher evals are part of it from what I've heard of the process there and she was definitely hired as principally a research oriented professor.

I can speak of Europe, is /mostly/ so (certainly not 100%) Poorer countries, paradoxically, because have less research, people teaching are there for, and like, teaching, explaining.

And, let me add, “research is (often) broken”:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9yPy3DeMUyI&t=913s&pp=ygUSUmVz...

What helps is explaining it to many people, and carefully listening the questions asked by them. It of course help also to have a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

It is more likely that it is exceedingly difficult to write like this, even for simple topics like this balancing blocks problem. The further you get into an academic subfield, the less likely it is that you can even describe what you are pondering in plain English.

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