Hacker News Reader

Many papers and many people make things seem far more complicated than they are

cough wikipedia cough

Wikipedia tries to be precise. For simplicity, you can look at the simple.wikipedia.org pages when available. For example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque vs https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torque . Most people aren't aware of this.

Many professors love making their students feel dumb for some reason.

You can generalize that to "many people love making less experienced or knowledgable people feel dumb."

Feel free to add qualifiers such as "experts", "position of authority", "newcomers", and "it's tradition!"