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I hadn’t actually considered academic writing as an expression of sociopathic manipulation until now, but it explains a lot.
This is perfect
One of my favorite Calvin & Hobbs. :D
Yeah, it’s an in-group exclusivity signifier.
Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there’s 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.
edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
IT guy here, we suffer from a similar problem where everything is an acronym so it sounds like alphabet soup that if said as a word means sometimes you can’t even quietly go look it up later. You either nod along knowing what it means or nod along not knowing what it means but having no chance to learn without outing yourself.
And you can’t out yourself because, in many workplace cultures, the appearance of knowing is more important than actually knowing. :/
And then you have multiple identical abbreviations meaning different things or different things that are pronounced the same or multi billion dollar ompanies naming their product after existing words (like Microsoft Word or Office or Outlook…).
Mix in abbreviated customer names, names for servers and internal teams (no, not Microsoft Teams©) and everything is only an incomprehensible letter mumbo-jumbo.
Had a ticket about sports sites being blocked, college talked about how the change was IOC related. International Olympic Committee or Indicator of Compromise, you decide!
Gotta love Dirichlet boundary conditions (the function has to have this value), Neumann boundary conditions (the derivative has to have this value) and Cauchy boundary conditions (both).
On the other hand, there’s a bunch of things that are so abstract that it’s difficult to give them a descriptive name, like rings, magmas and weasels
Oh i would say “ring” is in fact quite a descriptive term.
Apparently, in older german, “ringen” meant “to make progress of some sort/to fight for something”. And a ring has two functions: addition and multiplication. These are the foundational functions that you can use to construct polynomials, which are very important functions. You could look at functions as a machine where you put something in and get something out.
In other words, you put something into a function, the function internally “makes some progress”, and spits out a result. That is exactly what you can do with a “ring”.
So it kinda makes sense, I guess.
Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.
You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that’s relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it’s baked into an image.
The quickest way I’ve gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.
I’ve been learning crypto math the hard way, it’s brutal.
I’ve found one way that works is to learn about the people, like learn about Gauss’s life and work, it helped give me context and perspective for the random terms.
Yeah, it can be really helpful to understand the context and the problems they were trying to solve.
Like for example, I think a lot of pop-sci talk about Special/General Relativity is missing huge chunks of context, because in reality, Einstein didn’t come up with these theories out of thin air. His breakthrough was creating a coherent framework out of decades of theoretical and experimental work from the scientists that came before him.
And the Einstein Field Equations really didn’t answer much on their own, they just posed more questions. It wasn’t until people started to find concrete solutions for them that we really understood just how powerful they were.
GR is fascinating, because it’s something you actually can spend a long, long time completely failing to observe.
Basically until you either try to understand galaxies, or you’ve got a pesky drift issue with your satellites, you don’t need to think about it much at all. Well I suppose if you want to understand why gravity is sometimes weird but you can just ignore that for a really long time.
I really like the naming of things after their discoverers/inventors. I’m picturing a mathematician getting upset:
“How dare you speak about Friedrich Gauss like that. He dragged that universities astronomy department out of the stone age, even after the death of his first wife…”
The history of the people helps me with remembering the concepts.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a mathematician.
My argument is not against naming things after the discoverer, though in engineering while we have some of this (Heaviside comes to mind), most other concepts have a semantic value so even unknown terms can be mapped fairly easily.
My main argument is that math is taught very poorly, if we had taught math as the history of math in school, this would be far more meaningful, we understand it as a story and each piece in the puzzle an event that brought it about.
Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
Yeah, this happens a lot. I studied math and I often got the impression that when you read other researcher’s work, they describe the exact same thing that you have already heard about, but in a vastly different language. I wonder how many re-inventions and re-namings there are of any concept simply because people can’t figure out that this thing has already been researched into. It really happens a lot, where 5 people discovered something, but gave them 5 different names.
It’s even worse, math uses arcane terms for things that in many other fields are basically just accepted.
Galois fields? In hardware and software, those are just normal binary unsigned integers of a given bit length.
I get that GFs came about first, but when they were later implemented for computers they weren’t usually (they are sometimes, mostly for carry less mul specifically, or when used for cryptography) called Galois fields, the behavior was just accepted as the default for digital logic.
The division operator of a Galois field (I prefer “finite field”, because it’s more descriptive) is nothing like the what computers usually use for unsigned integers. Like, if you’re working mod 5, then 3/2 = 4 (because 2 * 4 = 8 = 3 mod 5).
realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
Programming is applied math. Mathematicians say “theory of mass service”, programmers say “schedulers”. Well, it’s “theory of mass service” in Russian, but in English it is “queue theory”.
I understood every word of that, and I hate you.
I understood about 45% of that, and I also hate them.
He said it’s hard to see through the style of their writing because they use fancy language related to their field of work and it causes a vicious cycle of other people doing the same while excluding normal people.
In defense of jargon:
coming up with new ideas and expressing them to others requires new vocabulary. You can’t simply say things in “plain English” especially when you want to communicate with peers.
This is why academia is so often refereed to as a discipline; you must train yourself in new ways of thinking. Making it accessible to the layperson is the job of scientific communicators, not scientists at large.
And it’s not like this is a unique issue with acedemia, every organization I’ve ever participated in had special vocabulary if it was necessary or not.
Jargon is only legitimate when it clarifies more than plain English. If it does, fine, use it.
Every single word in the original post clarifies more than plain English. It is more specific and has better nuance than a plain translation.
That doesn’t make it a useful explanation because the audience of the statement is not the in-group using the jargon.
One part of my daily job is translating “technical” into “manager”. The translation always loses fidelity to the original. Jargon exists because it’s useful, not because there’s a deliberate attempt to keep others out. Some will then use it as a shibboleth but that does not mean it’s original purpose was such.
For what it’s worth: that’s true of all translations. I’ve done real time translation from Italian into English and it’s always missing the nuance of the original. I’ve read the divine comedy in English and Italian and the English is always missing the context and nuance.
Language is an abstract representation of concepts and never maps faithfully.
exactly, i’ve noticed some people on youtube can be REALLY good at this, like Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong for example. Just introduce your jargon the first time it’s used and put up a little explanation every time afterward.
inhales
Complex 1a was prepared according to well-known synthetic procedures. The reduction potential of the complex was increased due to the nephelauxetic expansion of the occupied FMOs induced by photolytic epimerization of the auxiliary tetrahydrophosphazolidine sulfide ligand to enable a strongly σ-donating dihaptic coordination mode.
translation: we made molecule 1a, we shouldn’t need to tell you how, it’s obvious, lmao, git gud. the molecule became less likely to gain extra electrons because shining light on it made one of its weird-ass totally-not-bullshit parts wiggle around a bit so that it could bind more strongly to the metal atom through two of its own adjacent atoms, making the metal atom’s relevant electrons floofier.
‘floofier’ should be standard academic jargon
you know the academic jargon is bad when you can translate it into french and the sentence is almost the exact same
French scholars are famous for their mastery of obscurantism. That’s what this is called.
Oh don’t even get me started about french philosophers - philosophy in general is very guilty of this, but french are absolutely the worst. Entire books of complete jargon where the point seems to be to sound as fancy as possible without as little content as possible
or as Freud put it:
“So, I gave my lecture yesterday. Despite the lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken before hand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly did not understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.”
I asked ChatGPT to convert the text to common words:
“Academic writing is often hard to understand because it uses complicated words specific to a particular field, making it easier for experts to communicate with each other but harder for outsiders to follow. This keeps certain knowledge limited to a small group of people and maintains a cycle where only the educated or ‘in’ crowd can fully engage, while others are left out.”
I think this leaves out the “epistemological imperative”, which I understand as the compulsion to use this specific language for the sake of being scientifically accurate. Particularly when dealing with peers, who will all too readily hold you accountable for inaccuracies, being precise is important, possibly even necessary to avoid the scientific community’s habit of tearing into any error to prove their own proficiency by showing up your deficiency.
I can’t find my source any more, unfortunately, but I read an article once about how students are essentially scared to have their writing torn to shreds because they were too direct in their assertions. I recall that it related an anecdote about birds on a movie set that were supposed to all fly away at the sound of a gunshot. Except they tried to fly away beforehand, so the solution was to tie them to the branch and release that wire when they were supposed to fly. Then the birds tried anyway, didn’t get anywhere, ended up hanging upside down and falling unconscious. When they tried again (after restoring the birds to consciousness), they released the wire… but the birds had learned that trying to fly away was unpleasant, so they just sat there instead. Why bother, if you go nowhere?
In the same manner, academics who write too clearly will end up getting bad grades, have papers rejected, essentially be punished for it. They may learn that, by carefully coaching their assertions, assumptions or just about anything that could be conceived as a statement of facts in a multi-layered insulation of qualifying statements and vague circumscriptions to avoid saying something wrong and show the acknowledgement that, like science in general, the causation they’re ascribing this phenomenon to is at best an educated guess and, while we can narrow down things that are not true, we can never be certain that things we assume are true really are and won’t be refuted somewhere down the line, making them look like morons…
I lost track of the sentence. Anyway, if you make mistakes, you’ll get attacked. Most people don’t like being attacked. So if you’ve been attacked enough, eventually you’ll either give up or adopt strategies to avoid being attacked.
Being complex and obscure in your phrasing makes it harder to attack you. And if it’s hard to understand you, people might just skim the points and not bother with the attackable details anway. If you notice that people who write in a difficult style don’t get attacked as much or as badly, you’ll adopt that style too.
Eventually, your writing is read by students stepping to fill your shoes. They may not understand why you write this way, but they see that many successful academics do. They may also experience the same attacks and come to the same conclusion. Either way, your caution has inspired a new generation of academic writers who will continue that trend.
Finally you’ll end up with a body of scientific knowledge that only experts can still navigate. They know to skim past the vagueness, indirections and qualifications, mostly understand the terms and can take the time to pick apart the details if something strikes them as odd. The common rube doesn’t understand jack shit. Your research may further the understanding of a small group of people, possibly see some practical use, but the general public can’t directly make any use of it.
The common rube doesn’t understand jack shit.
Everyone has their area of expertise. “The common rube” at the hospital can be a professional cab driver who has half the city memorized or a sports buff who can tell you every significant baseball stat going back twenty years or a vagrant who has survived by mastering a litany of social protocols unique to the homeless population or a musician who has an entire arcane language for their craft.
As you specialize, you develop a jargon for the minutiae of your field. Which does go to your underlying point
Your research may further the understanding of a small group of people, possibly see some practical use, but the general public can’t directly make any use of it.
More broadly, they wouldn’t have the opportunity to leverage the research productively. If you need an electron microscope or an industrial boiler or a large population of waterfowl to make practical use of a piece of research data, most people aren’t going to be in the position to find it useful.
That said, expanding the pool of expertise is also supposed to be a major role of the academic system. If people in or adjacent to your field have trouble understanding your research output, it isn’t easily transmissible to people who do have an opportunity to leverage it.
One of the reasons why you have these large populations of sports buffs and musical talents and cab drivers bouncing around is thanks to the improved mechanisms of education distribution. Finding a middle ground between specificity and accessibility is critical if you want to grow your population of specialists.
Not bad
Don’t worry. It’s LLMs all the way down. Always has been.
You should ask ChatGPT to generate some porn so you can go fuck off with it. Sick of hearing about these LLMs.
They can absolutely be useful tools if you use them right. They’re just quite overhyped at the moment.
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Nah they’re useless. They do a worse job than a human and cost more power than cryptocurrency.
Shut them all down.
Hopefully it goes the way of 3d tvs but it won’t.
Corporations are to invested
I understand; I was just being transparent with the fact that I’m a lazy motherfucker and that I used it to “translate” the text.
I’m still pissed at being forced to write in a passive voice in university. It’s awkward and carries less information, and makes it seem like nobody had any agency, science just kind of happened on its own and you were there to observe it.
I don’t know why anyone would prefer something like “An experiment was conducted and it was found that…”
To the much better “We conducted an experiment and found…”
Yeah, it’s dumb. We write like normal people in academic papers too. I don’t know why they ever taught it this way.
convinced some people just get off on arbitrary grammatical rules
That also sounds odd to me. I’ve been consistently taught in school to avoid passive voice and it was a huge struggle for me for a long time (case in point). I’m attending a college in Canada for the record.
I got taught that rule in my freshman year, but then my thesis advisor told me to stop doing that because “only old people write like that”
So I suppose academia is evolving (however you still aren’t allowed to use first person speech)
Remember, it’s never “your dildo,” it’s “a dildo.”
It’s something that people, in least in my field of microbiology, have been recently aware of and are trying to correct. The problem is not just an in-group signifier, since everyone, even experts, finds the author insufferable and difficult to understand
I understood all of that.
That’s what half a year of city college will get you.
In my first year of uni, I had to write a 20 page paper, so I wrote it about how academic writing sucks.
Cheeky as hell, but I got a good grade, and my teacher liked it
It’s legit a great topic. Scientists need to remember that communication is an important skill.
I dated a girl who acted like writing / talking like that made her better / smarter than other people. She got off on the elitism. I’m no academic slouch, but my philosophy is if you can’t break it down in basic terms that anyone can understand, then you don’t understand it enough yourself.
I would go so far as to say that knowing and understanding something is only half of the issue. The other half is being able to clearly convey it to others. And that’s where a lot of people (myself included) fall short.
I think any scientist should able to convey at least the high level concepts that they’re working on at the level that a smart 12th-grader can follow. If you can’t do that, I think that’s a sign that you’re probably not thinking about your work very clearly. Being able to distill things and context-switch back to a birds-eye view of your work is critical for knowing what direction you’re heading in.
(I say this from the perspective of a climate scientist - our field has a pretty active public/lay conversation and lots of science comma, but I think the concept still applies to other sciences, and social sciences.)
I could break stuff down to you but I won’t because I have shit to do and there’s textbooks. Also your eyes would glaze over 2% of the way in. So in that sense, I can’t, because I can’t make you actually want to understand it. Best I can do is hand-wave and rely on you not understanding why my explanation falls short of actually being one, making you think you understood something.
Talking shop and obfuscation are not the same thing but are generally indistinguishable for the uninitiated. I guess what I’m mostly miffed about is the implication that’s going on in OP’s erudite thesis and your anecdote: That people who talk about stuff you don’t understand do it to exclude. Maybe, you know, stuff is just complicated and needs years of study and practice to understand. It’s not a status thing, someone with a Ph.D in chemistry will have quite a task ahead of them understanding what hair stylists are talking about when talking shop about chemicals unless they themselves happen to specialise in that area. Now try explaining conditioner chemistry to a philosopher, instead, it’s probably hopeless.
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I don’t agree, there’s a reason why we need people like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining things in simpler terms and that they’re not the people doing the research itself…
and that they’re not the people doing the research itself…
I don’t think that’s relevant. People like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have also done great at explaining science to the general public.
Sure, but not being able to explain it in layman’s terms doesn’t mean you don’t understand what you’re working on and in fact the majority of scientists and engineers and programmers and highly specialized individuals aren’t very good at vulgarization for the simple reason that they don’t need to do it when they’re accomplishing the work and outside of that they’re not required to explain their work to laymen since there are people specialized in doing just that.
I also disagree with the original comment you replied to. I was just responding to the part I quoted. I agree most specialists in a field don’t know how to explain things to non-specialists and I agree it’s important to have people who know how to explain things in layman terms, I jusy don’t think it’s relevant if those people are also the ones doing the research or not.
The loser research paper vs the chad blog tutorial
^ literally anything related to buffer overflow attacks lol
Academic security research is constitutionally bad because academia as an environment selects people with a “hacker mentality” out at the freshman stage.
It’s inherently biased towards rule-followers. That’s not a bad thing, but it means it’s bad at some things. Such as computer security research.
If I might interject.
One word mean many thing to not same people.
Use special word for special job. Special job doers no get dizzy. All know special word mean same thing.
Special words job help make many people with not same word skill talk gooder.
I don’t read much (/any) academic writing, but does it really misuse words the way the link portrays?
Eg
- academic writing isn’t prose, like that’s almost the definition of prose.
- intra-specialized doesn’t mean anything (the intra prefix didn’t work on adjectives)
- “obfuscating … accessibility” means making it difficult to see that it is accessible, where the author probably actually wants to say “reducing the ability of outsiders to access the meaning”
I get that it is satire, but imo it would be better satire if he put in the work to actually make it mean something. Unless the point is that academic writers misuse thesauruses this badly.
I think the point is that academic writers use large terms, despite using them wrong, when diminutive ones would suffice.
They use big words for the sake of using big words. Whether they make any sense whatsoever, is entirely beside the point.
The text, as I understand it is essentially saying the same thing, using big words to obfuscate that they’re actually saying something rather boring and simple, which also has the point of obfuscating the meaning of the text to anyone who isn’t an academic; aka someone who isn’t used to such nonsensical word play.
There’s a good reason I’ve avoided any work in academic fields. They incorrectly use terms, which just muddies the water on what the hell they’re actually saying. Not only because the terms are big/less known, but because they’re often used wrong.
IMO, academics are morons who like to sound smart.
… Do you concur?
I don’t think that there’s a higher concentration of morons in academia than in larger society. However, their professional experience is pretty different from the so called ‘real world’ so they definitely can have some unfathomable blind spots.
I agree with this, especially that the number of morons isn’t higher than society at large, and therein lies the problem with society.
Not unlike LLMs. How curious.
Socioeconomic encryption. Fun fact: the Chinese written language was focused on this concept — and Korean focused on doing the opposite, in fact.
I think the meaning of the actual words that he chose is less important than the fact that it sounds absurdly convoluted.
Also I don’t think his point is true. If you read academic papers come up most of them are pretty easy to understand.
thesauri*
*thesaurisi
Veni, Vidi, Thesaurisi?
It’s saying that it uses terminology that is well-understood, specific and explicit within the field, but depends on a common understanding of the language used. So people outside the field are unable to understand it, even though they would be able to understand the actual concepts.
I agree that that’s probably what it’s trying to say, but I don’t think it actually says that.
