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.
Is it really science, if it doesn’t sound like something Neil deGrasse Tyson would say to himself for 30 minutes straight in front of his bathroom mirror?
lmao that’s the other extreme. I’m just complaining about unnecessary complexity when there is no need for it. It’s tiring to have to keep translating academic back into English, especially when you want to explain the concept to someone who’s having trouble understanding it/is not as familiar with it as you are
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).
Funny thing is that psych papers tend to be very readable. So scientists can only communicate effectively if they exclusively study the human mind lol
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!
For sure, you occasionally run into some obscurantism, and that’s problematic. In my field, bad writing is usually just from people not writing in their native language.
But look, you have to acknowledge, some stuff is just hard. There is often just an unavoidable barrier to entry. I think behind a lot of this sentiment is the assumption that academics are just twiddling their thumbs for 10 years through undergrad and grad school, and anyone should be able to walk into the kind of conversations they’re having after all that. I mean, most of the time, not really. We go a learn a bunch of stuff and our colleagues learn similar things, and we then assume a common framework and some common knowledge, both of which are generally not widely available to the general public.
Where I got my PhD, we all had to write a lay summary of the thesis. It’s good they made us do it, but we always used to laugh about it. There’s usually too much assumed background for a useful lay summary to even be possible. You just end up with a very vague facsimile of a summary of the type of thing you’re doing.
It might depend on the field. I have no doubt that the average paper in my field is unavoidably going to be pretty inscrutable to laypeople, and that’s mostly fine. Maybe in some other fields it’s more avoidable, somehow, but again I’d have to imagine that if people are spending their time productively in the academic system they’ll have picked up a bunch of background mostly unavailable to most people.
As a PS, there’s also something weird to me in general about people thinking that they know how to do other peoples’ jobs better than them. See it all the time with retail, planning, media etc, people can’t seem to fathom that things may be the way they are for good reasons that they aren’t privy to.
I think there’s still a difference between describing a concept in a way laypeople would understand and describing it using plain English. The latter is what I consider good scientific writing.
Sure there is a difference. The comment I was replying to was talking about making text accessible to outsiders though. Even just talking about plain English is a bit problematic though - the problem is that a whole bunch of technical disciplines are jargon heavy and not easily amenable to straightforward plain English. If you’re talking about things like general flowery prose, it essentially doesn’t exist in the hard sciences - at least that I’ve seen.
Maybe the humanities are different, but I sometimes wonder if the humanities are under more scrutiny because they deal with topics laypeople reckon they have a good intuitive grasp on. I actually had an interesting time at a party recently watching a sociology grad student working on the Scottish criminal justice system politely nod as a young English woman lectured her on the topic purely based on whatever half digested stereotypes she’d picked up in her 30-odd years.
To reach the necessary amount of pages so I can graduate.
Inferior writers, inferior minds.
I’m academia? How about Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that should be written (at least at synopsis level) clearly and for the casual reader. However, anything mathematics related and… Fuck you, you don’t know how to calculate an integral? Git gud, scrub.
some papers are almost like they are trying to keep the core idea a secret
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*
Bad grammar nazi, there are several other typos! Bad!
I just catch the ones the news with my dyslexia.
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.
It doesn’t fit in context, they clearly meant incentive.
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.
Would a list of tools and search engines be helpful?
That would be very helpful 🥴
Sorry, better late than never. Will dm you. Others are welcome too.
My life got so much better when I started assuming the former.
I feel like that’s good advice for reasonably intelligent people. But it’s kind of a slippery slope, especially for people that are dumb as shit. For example, my neighbor became a hard antivaxxer during COVID.
She mistrusted everything that was actually science, assuming that she since she didn’t understand what qualified professionals were saying, they must be wrong. But if someone could make a simple (even if incredibly wrong) argument on YouTube, she’d eat that shit up.
Yes
