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Comment by simonw | Hacker News Reader

> This is a blog-style writeup of the paper

YES! I'd love to see more of this. Academic writing is designed to be frustrating to read. Publishing both a paper and a readable blog-style version of it is such a great pattern.

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> Academic writing is designed to be frustrating to read.

Maybe you didn't mean it this way, but it does come across as intentional sometimes.

I see it as a long-standing cultural thing. If you try to make the text more friendly and readable you'll be told to fix it by peer-review. There's a very well established formal academic writing style and you have to actively learn how to consume it.

I'm sure there are justifiable reasons for why it evolved that way, but it doesn't make for an easy format for extracting and understanding the underlying ideas if you're not already deeply immersed in that particular corner of academia.

Most papers I read I really want to go to a coffee shop/bar with the author and have a human conversation with them to find out what the paper is about and which bits of it are interesting and novel without putting in hours of additional effort myself!

I see it as something similar to Aviation English:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

Scientific papers are often written and read by non-native speakers. A standardized formal style is less likely to embed potentially confusing cultural assumptions.

> Most papers I read I really want to go to a coffee shop/bar with the author and have a human conversation with them to find out what the paper is about and which bits of it are interesting and novel without putting in hours of additional effort myself!

This is why journal clubs were invented. All the fun discussion, none of the inaccessible academic writing.

It's also what I use frontier LLMs for -- prompt with the paper, and then attempt to tear it to shreds while the LLM pushes back against me. By the time the model and I are done, I generally understand the paper far better than if I'd sat down to read it cold. Then I actually read the paper.

All that said, I do feel that you can still write engaging papers in the academia. Some disciplines manage this as the norm -- take a look at some articles in the field of History, and the writing often manages to be rich and eloquent, while still making impeccable arguments with evidence. The greater problem is that a lot of academics in the sciences are just poor writers, and likely studied the sciences because they weren't into arts in the first place and avoided learning how to write well. Sad times.

I’ve had a surprising amount of success by emailing one of the authors of various papers and asking those exact kind of questions (though more specific: I need to show that I have put effort in!)

I reluctantly confess that I have indeed on occasion had to write in a way that makes the reader have to do a couple of extra mental steps to follow the logic, to avoid reviewers rejecting the manuscript on the grounds of the theoretical contribution being "trivial".

Combine this with added fees for longer papers and you have your answer.

academic writing is designed so a paper is part of a conversation, i.e. 100 other papers strongly relevant to the current paper. And the author needs to compress the ideas from those 100 other papers, plus their own additions to the conversation, into 6 pages.

Keep in mind those 100 other papers also went through this kind of data compression.

So the number of ideas/concepts per paragraph is much higher than 'popular' writing, and some base familiarity with the concepts under discussion needs to be assumed.

Yes, it is hard work to read these. Even when you are active in the field. Generally I need to read at least the abstracts of a some of the key references in order to understand the paper I'm interested in.

Information density is one part, precision is another. Papers are often presenting work at the frontier of the field, which is by nature not well understood yet, and competitive. To have something worthy of publication is to have something that is new, and that often requires a degree of precision to communicate that we don't use casually. I think it's pretty gross to denigrate "academic writing" as obfuscatory, just like it's gross to make broad sweeping generalizations about journalists.

Intentionally confusing and complex content is commonplace in academia and certain industries as a way of giving themselves a moat between them and anyone else that could do their work.

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