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 despise this, too. I work in a pretty technical field and actively throw bricks at people who write like this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Variables can be in arbitrary units. If you put the units through the same steps as the values, you’ll end up with the right unit, plus you need the values to be in compatible units for the operations to even make sense. At least as long as any constants are also given the correct units. This can also help discover cases where you accidentally mix similar but different units (like litres and gallons).
I also find it very satisfying to do those equations on the units, adding ones that get multiplied in and cancelling ones that get divided out, and then ending up with a unit that makes sense, given what the equation was supposed to express.
Though we might be saying the same thing, because while I don’t think variables need units, expanding that variable with a value absolutely should involve a unit, as should any examples of that equation’s use.
Edit: an example to show what I mean:
If you have a table that is 1.5m long and know that you want at least 2 feet between the wall and the table on each side so that people can get in and out if chairs comfortably, you’d have 1.5m + 2*2ft as the equation, but you can’t add an m to a ', so you need to multiply one of them by a conversion factor:
1.5m + 2 * 0.3048m/ft * 2ft
The ft terms cancel out and you’re left with
1.5m + 2 * 0.3048m * 2
= 1.5m + 1.2192m
~= 2.72m
So your space must be at least 2.72m to fit that table and chairs comfortably (by the above definition of comfort, at least).
Funny enough, this use of units helped me avoid a mistake in this example because I had the ft/m conversion initially but saw that would result in trying to add m to ft² so it was obvious that I had made a mistake. Otherwise I might have looked like an idiot trying to say that a 1.5m table with 4 feet of buffer space requires a room over 12m long.
Honestly. Working with academics in science was so annoying at times exactly because too many academics talk just like this.
Too often I sat with them wishing I could just tell them to speak plainly FFS - unnecessarily complex, overly specific jargon doesn’t make you look any better, it makes you look smarmy.
They’re probably insecure and intelligence and people’s perception of it is their only crutch.
I wouldn’t assume malice in all cases. Maybe they just aren’t great at breaking down complex subjects into plain language because it’s complex. Being an effective communicator and teacher is a skill that needs a lot of patience, practice, development, and feedback in order to get good, especially when trying to convey ideas through speech.
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.
warning: it is very fringe.
Jacques Vallee. He had a Ted talk (or Ted ex or whatever) and it was equally unimpressive.
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
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.
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.
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.
In high school, I used to be frustrated by this as well. But now, I’ve come to appreciate being able to get a reminder for a definition or a famous result just by googling and clicking on the resulting wikipedia page. Way better than having to find and dig through a badly-scanned pdf of a paper from the 70s which presented the definition that everyone in the field now uses.
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.
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.
The argument is also sometimes as dumb as it looks
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.
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.
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 ;-;
