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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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

The only field where it’s actually justified: math. In math, every time has an exact definition behind it, and you have to use the exact term.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

Yeah, a little of column A, a little from column B.