some papers are almost like they are trying to keep the core idea a secret
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Unfortunately there's a bit of pressure to osbficate the core idea of a publication in academia. While the ideal academics try to hold themselves to is to freely exchange information, for researchers who are paid to study very neiche topics there's an insensitive to put some resistance into others entering their field. There is only so much funding and one more team means more competition. So some researchers who find themselves in that position will intentionally complicate their published work as a way to create a disincentive to others from crowding their field. It sucks but the reality is that funding and money come before the faithful pursuit of knowledge.
Also, some people just suck at writing.
Incentive*
As a (perhaps unintentional) slip, "an insensitive" works rather well here. Gatekeeping your field in a forum of open(ish)^1^ information exchange is just categorically "not nice".
Personally, I would have opted for a portmanteau like "incentsitive".
^1^ - Paywalls notwithstanding.
Bad grammar nazi, there are several other typos! Bad!
I just catch the ones the news with my dyslexia.
quick rant
i'm so tired of over the top "intellectual" vocabulary in academia. a lot of concepts could be explained with simple words and would get the point across just as well, or better, and additionally make the conversation more accessible to those outside of a specific field. Why do you need to use big smart words to explain simple things? Is it because it tickles your ego when people need 10 minutes to comprehend one sentence? argh
I always thought it had to do with avoiding ambiguity. By using a specific word with a specific meaning, you don't need to expand on the context. I think I read that somewhere a long time ago and just accepted it.
It is pretty much this, same reason lawyers use "legalese" in contracts. That word has an accepted meaning, when used the meaning is clear to others in the field. You don't need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.
In saying that, sometimes it is just complication for the sake of complication.
There is a saying, usually attributed to Einstein but could also be William of Ockham:
Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
People often focus on the first part while ignoring the more important second part. When something is made too simple, you lose the nuance and fine detail that makes it a useful concept. Not everything can be ELI5'd, somethings are just really complicated.
You don't need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.
For lawyers, it's the opposite, actually. Lawyers are overly cautious and choose to explicitly define terms themselves, all the time. If they can reference a definition already in a specific law, great. But they'll go ahead and explicitly make that link, instead of relying on the reader to assume they know which law to look up.
So any serious contract tends to use pages and pages of definitions at the beginning.
Imagine programmers being reluctant to use other people's libraries, but using the same function and variable names with slightly different actual meanings/purposes depending on the program. That's what legal drafting is like.
I struggle with this at work a lot. My manager often tries to push me for a simpler explanation, but unfortunately I can only simplify things so much before they start being wrong in a lot of situations
If you want to get published you've got to sound the part. No fancy words => no publishing => no grant money => less sciencing and more flipping burgers
yeah i know, second part of the rant went into how capitalism is shit but i feel like a broken record saying that constantly, it's true of course, but i want to talk about some other things sometimes too
I didn't see the capitalism bad part, but I agree, I also think we should seize the means of production and crush the bourgeoisie.
that's because i started writing it and then deleted it lol
hell yeah to that!
I despise this, too. I work in a pretty technical field and actively throw bricks at people who write like this.
100%. This is actually the entire reason I dropped out of my masters program.
I’m a science communicator. My whole purpose for existing is making science accessible to people with less formal science training than a high school student.
I was going for a masters in conservation biology, because what better to communicate these days, right? And in the limnology class I took the first semester, all my papers got poor marks for failing to use the unnecessary academic terminology. It was all entirely correct information, just simplified, and that was unacceptable.
And I can’t work under those terms. I just am entirely incapable of making things overly complicated for no reason. It’s a force for specificity sometimes, but usually what it actually does is limit the reach of the work. And that’s just stupid.
What kills me a little is when someone has to come up with some nebulous acronym that we're all supposed to know but no one ever defines it at the beginning of the document. In EEG we like to change the name of what are now known as lateralized periodic discharges. I have a document with about 25 different terms that all describe different terminology that's been used to describe that EEG finding.
Meanwhile I'm in here thinking, I wonder what EEG means?
I'm not sure but I think that comment might be clever satire
It turns out it wasn't, which might be even more hilarious
See how desensitized I am to that, electroencephalography. Electro- electronic, encephalo- head, graph- record, electronic head record, those wavy lines from the brain.
That same problem can be seen in law and it's a lot more relevant to the average citizen than academic papers, since "know your rights" means jack shit if you have no fucking clue what the words mean.
It's snobbish gatekeeping to feel superior to the filthy plebs
goodness, don't even get me started on law. I had a hard time reading my tenancy agreement, and I know I'm not a stupid person. I'm not saying this to brag, but how is someone, let's say less intellectually inclined, supposed to deal with that? Sign whatever paper they get told allows them to have shelter and hope they didn't just sell their firstborn to the landlord?
The law falls back to a bunch of hidden rules if the language isn't explicit.
"No vehicles in the park" is a simple rule, but then poses problems when you have to ask whether that includes baby strollers, regular bicycles, or electric assist bicycles, whether there's an exception for ambulances in an emergency, etc.
Somewhat famously, there was a case a decade or so ago where someone was prosecuted under Sarbanes Oxley's obstruction of justice provisions, passed to criminalize Enron-like accounting coverups. The guy was convicted for tossing undersized fish overboard to avoid prosecution for violating fish and wildlife rules. The statute made it a crime for anyone who “knowingly alters, destroys, mutilates, conceals, covers up, falsifies, or makes a false entry in any record, document, or tangible object with the intent to impede, obstruct, or influence” a federal investigation. So the Supreme Court had to figure out whether a fish is a "tangible object" in the meaning of the law, when it is clearly a "tangible object" within the normal meaning of the term, but not the type of object that stores records, as everything else described in the criminal statute.
So that just means, in the end, simplicity of language can betray complexity of meaning underneath. Lawyers tend to prefer to make things clear up front so that there's no uncertainty later on, and that just leads to unreasonably complicated language.
Me as an intern in a lab, being asked among others to review a draft
Hey, can you explain to me equation 3.1? I am not sure what N and Q refers to?
Oh that one I just copied from another paper, it is not really important to the argument.
The lack of labeling each variable (with units!) in equations really boils my piss. Yes the author knows them by heart, but even peers in the same field could struggle to understand what they mean. If introductory chemistry and physics instructors beat the practice into their students I see no excuse for authors to leave them out in a thesis.
I yell at any co worker about exactly this. We even deal with the public and they use terms and jargon no one will understand it leads to mistakes.
It's just weird gatekeeping.
Oddly enough multiple classes I took at uni even covered communicating with simple terms, being understandable, and not using jargon. Yet here we are still...
To reach the necessary amount of pages so I can graduate.
There's a popular figure in a fringe topic who's contributed to computer science enough to have earned respect (and rightfully so) who writes these fringe articles with so much fanfare and pretentiousness that the entire meaning is impossible to extract.
It just ends up sounding like a pretentious word salad.
Who?
warning: it is very fringe.
Jacques Vallee. He had a Ted talk (or Ted ex or whatever) and it was equally unimpressive.
Note that he's French. The French have a particularly bad case of this (e.g. continental philosophy).
I'm currently writing a small literature review on tgf-b and SMAD signalling in cancer for uni rn
And I'm really confused why this one paper's talking about how miR-520h induces the tgf-b/smad7 pathway but also binds to and suppresses smad7
Like why on earth is it activating the tgf-b/smad7 pathway, a pathway that stops stuff like the epithelial mesenchynal transition, if it's just going to bind to smad7 anyway???
Worst thing is, I can't find any other papers on why this actually happens
I swear I'm just dumb at times ;-;
Ah, yes. Of course. I understand your frustration entirely because of my deep understanding of the specific situation.
Cell signalling pathways was the worst part of microbial genetics for me. Luckily I don't have to deal with that anymore as my day to day is digital PCR and NGS.
The argument is also sometimes as dumb as it looks
My life got so much better when I started assuming the former.
Yep.
When I was in high school, I was upset that I didn't know enough.
When I was in my 30s, I worked hard to fully understand everything.
Now I'm in my 40s and I just assume I'm stupid. I got nothing to prove. If I'm convincing a group that's paying me to explain some tech architecture, sure. But a group of bros who want me to weigh in on why the sky is green, bruh IDGAF sure the sky is green.