Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Xcelerate | Hacker News Reader

This is a general problem with academic books/papers. Authors rarely focus on making their work as easily understandable as possible. Instead, the goal almost seems to be the opposite -- how obscure sounding can I make this paper (so that I appear really smart) while still maintaining correctness?

It's very frustrating. We get it: you're smart. Now quit using words like "complecting" and quit using elliptic modular forms when addition and subtraction would suffice instead.

EDIT: Alright, so the downvotes indicate my post was a little rant-ish (I don't get downvoted much on here so it disturbs me when I do). I apologize for that. There were a few papers that I read recently where some of the words were very obtuse and I couldn't think of a good reason for choosing those over simpler and more communicative words. "Authors rarely..." was likewise an exaggeration.

But I do stand by my point that clear communication is something I think technically-oriented people should focus on. Perhaps courses could be offered where you describe a complex subject and then others in the class comment on what areas were the most confusing. This is different than a peer-review process in that you're not necessarily focusing on the accuracy of the material but the clarity of its expression.

Speaking as the author of multiple academic articles (theoretical physics), I would fundamentally disagree with your assessment. We usually are trying our absolute hardest to communicate a new advance in the field in anywhere from 4-8 pages, references and introduction included. We're essentially trying to sum up (in my case) 2 years of work in as short of a space as possible so, to do this, we assume that the reader has a working knowledge of the foundations of the field but provide references to this. The references serve to 1) provide evidence for unoriginal claims that you make (every sentence that communications an unoriginal result should have a citation) and 2) allow those who are unfamiliar with the field to pick up the basics as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, some of our prose is a bit obtuse because it's reasonably common for scientists to blow off their humanities courses because they're not science -- not realizing that most of our career will depend on the quality of our writing. You shouldn't confuse our incompetence with malice though.

Sorry, I guess a few bad experiences lately have given me in to hyperbole. I do research myself and at least with some of the papers I've read recently, I've noticed questionable vocabulary choices. I can't think of a reason for using certain obtuse words when a simpler word would be much clearer, but as you say, perhaps it is just the word that the researcher thought most apt.

One's ability to use simple words to describe complex concepts is a function of not just understanding of the concept itself, but also mastery of the language. Consider that many (most?) of the research papers you've read were written by non-native English speakers. In my experience, people who are native English speakers have an easier time being both precise and concise.

Don't worry, I felt the same when I was starting to read papers as a graduate student but I came to realize that in cases like the one where you mentioned elliptic modular forms being introduced to vastly overcomplicate something, it was usually done to make something true in a far more general set of space.

For me in physics? That came about when I started reading papers where people were doing stuff with differential geometry on manifolds. I couldn't, for the life of me, figure out why people would talk about a wedge product when a cross product would have sufficed until about 6 months later when it clicked that doing something in a coordinate agnostic framework allows you to prove things for any coordinate system and create general formulas that just need a few things "plugged in."

I'm not going to pretend to know that that's why elliptical modular forms are being used in your context but everytime something has seemed needlessly overcomplicated, I've come to realize after some thinking that it's done with a view towards generality.

I understand where you're coming from (in your frustration at least), but where most academic papers are concerned this isn't an issue of attempting to sound "smart", it's an issue of audience.

The audience of most academic writing is other experts in the same field, and the goal is to convey the contribution. Without the necessary abstractions, and therefore the requirement of understanding them, the task of composing works on meaningful contributions would be absurdly difficult.

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