15 ms·

The readability of scientific texts is decreasing

82 points by gfredtech 9y ago

brudgers 9y ago
I suspect that today scientific texts are more frequently written by non-native English speakers and that technical jargon can be more precisely defined and understood in terms of non-English languages. It is also worth noting that scientific terms of 100 years ago are often more main stream, e.g. quantum mechanics, relativity, uncertainty, etc.
- deleted 9y ago
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- trollopTheJope 9y ago
  thank you for sharing your suspicions
- krick 9y ago
  I'm pretty sure this is not the case. Scientific texts are usually awfully bad in any language I speak, including 2 languages that are my native. In fact, "scientific paper style" language is so distinct, that it can be easily applied to a paper that is not "scientific" per se, essentially obfuscating it. It seems to be very unpopular opinion here on HN, but it seems clear to me, that academia has become some kind of patalogical structure, which exists to exists — essentially an organism. It feeds on government and student's money, as long as it can seems credible and necessary to the outside world; and people within this structure can live as long, as they show that they are not "slacking" somehow — publishing papers, giving lectures — but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result. Form has become more important than the essence. So, here we have it: the form of a "scientific paper".
  - spaceseaman 9y ago
    The casual nature with which you dismiss thousands of people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of academic knowledge is frustrating and incredibly childish. Like seriously? Do you think all of us PhDs just sit around and laugh about how dumb the government is while planning how we can make more useless papers? Do you think grad students just train to become better bullshitters? Like what kind of hole do you live in where any of that even appears close to reality. Seems to me you just tried reading a couple papers, got confused, and decided to justify your own intelligence by claiming their hard work and advancements in the field were pointless. > but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result Stop talking out of your rear end. I want to produce a result. My advisor wants to produce a result. We all want to have meaning in our lives. EDIT: As just a casual example of the importance of academia, look at the Deep Learning boom. First researched around 1960, only now becoming practical and useful. It's almost as if the things academics study need time and a lot of work to actually come to fruition. Research level study is highly expensive for very little real gains. This has always been the case. It takes a long-long time for the investments into research to make sense, but when they do, the advancements are completely game-changing.
    - gaius 9y ago
      The ratio of PhDs awarded annually to tenure track positions that opens up suggests that a lot of activity in the sector isn't leading anywhere.
      - spaceseaman 9y ago
        It's almost as if most research doesn't go anywhere. If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find the switch? Oh wait, I lied. There's not actually a switch, but there might be a candle in that general direction. Maybe. That's how little we have to go off of. That's how empty any information on your study is. I don't think people really understand how hard this type of work is. Research is a purely exploratory and creative work. Like art, science requires time, patience, and many many failures. You don't just get a bunch of eureka-Einsteins that come out of MIT day one knocking down Theorems and discovering new physical laws. That's just not humanly possible and it's ridiculous if you think it'll ever work that way I am perfectly willing to admit that the vast majority of research and PhD's went nowhere and will continue to go nowhere for a long time. But that doesn't mean they're useless. Research requires exploration. It requires trial and error. It is highly inefficient and does not fit well in a consumerist society like ours, but this is the way that works best for us so far. If you have some better idea, then why don't you go out and do it? How are you going to get a bunch of incredibly intelligent, creative, and independent people funded and provided for in a society that values immediate results over long term achievements? I'm not arguing the academia system is perfect. Any one knows it's screwed up beyond belief. But it's not out of malice. We're not purposely trying to make the world worse, or something ridiculous like that. You have many people who care a lot about the science, who need to eat and sleep and need money to do that. Sometimes the money goes to their heads, sometimes their massive egos get the better of them, but do you seriously think we don't care about science? You'd have to be an idiot to do a PhD for the money or the fame. Why do you think we put 7+ years of our lives into stuff like this? So most PhDs don't actually get tenured positions. What are you actually trying to say? Are you saying there aren't enough tenured positions? Or are you implying that these PhDs don't deserve tenured positions? Do you have any evidence for either of those claims? Because otherwise you're just participating in more armchair speculation.
  - im3w1l 9y ago
    I think the reason that people prioritize the form is because of a kind of cargo cult. The form is followed because that's how it's always been and it has worked so far. And people are scared that if the form is changed it will have unexpected consequences.
    - coliveira 9y ago
      All this discussion doesn't consider the fact that papers are written for specific audience: scientists in a very narrow field. What seems to be gibberish for you is perfectly understandable for people working in that area, otherwise it wouldn't be even published in the first place. Now, it is true that it would be nice to have this translated into laymen words, but the problem is that scientists usually have better things to do...
      - im3w1l 9y ago
        I found your post pretty condescending. I have read and understood many papers. Even written one.
  - SubiculumCode 9y ago
    The facts are the opposite really. Today we are collecting so much data that we don't have enough time to actually write it all up. That is why we beyond busy. And to your others assertions. Utter hogwash.
  - CuriouslyC 9y ago
    Academia is absolutely necrotic. Between the fact that good scientists spend most of their time writing grants, the fact that most scientists spend their life as eternal postdocs, the rigged publishing game, the increasing balkanization of fields, the fact that most people are trying to protect the status quo rather than overturn it, and the goal of publishing rather than actually discovering, things look very grim. I think that government needs to cut back on grants, and instead provide better incentives for corporations to do open access basic research. This would still have the problem of producing somewhat obfuscated science, but in general it would push things towards being more interdisciplinary and functional, since corporations could increase profitability by leveraging synergies between basic and applied research.
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chwahoo 9y ago
"Furthermore", "novel", "distinct" are scientific jargon that reduce readability? Seems like a non-problem to me.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Usually it is the omissions that hurt. Rarely bad sentence structure. Harder jargon sometimes does so too and especially custom underdefined notation.
payne92 9y ago
I like'd PG's tweet about this: "Possible explanation: papers are becoming less how you communicate ideas, and more how you register work to get credit for it." https://twitter.com/i/web/status/906075608181915649 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/906075608181915649
- ahartmetz 9y ago
  The old problem "when you turn a metric into a goal, it ceases to be a good metric". Scientists are rewarded for churning out a large number of fragmentary (if you have a really good idea, it's good for more than one paper), shoddily written papers to collect citation points. "The stuff between the formulas" is not something authors really care about. I noticed the awful writing in new (physics) papers when I was still in university and had to read a paper occasionally. I was always relieved to find a paper from before roughly 1980. They are so much better written. Older papers are often better written than most textbooks while recent papers are much, much worse. It is not just due to the subject matter changing. Reportedly, journals also used to have paid copy editors. Today - well, you have heard about Elsevier and other publishers, right? They don't only seem to increase prices to increase their profits.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    Writing ability is on the wane in general. In professional settings, IMO this is mostly due to the disappearance of secretaries and clerical staff, lousy education and more non-native speakers. A long time ago as an intern, I had to re-typeset and format some reports published by a .gov since the 1910s for reprint and web publishing. You would see variations in style, but the reports started getting worse in the early 80s, and are almost incomprehensible today.
    - ahartmetz 9y ago
      It may also be because university education used to be for those with a great interest in science, and I guess for some reasonably intelligent upper class folks with nothing better to do. The first group had the motivation, the second group the habit and education to express themselves well. Today it is for those who want to get a good job. The education for a job majority lowers the standards for everyone. Btw I'm a middle class guy who did it mostly for job prospects and such, so...
karmakaze 9y ago
If you consider that current areas of research is both broader in overall and narrower/deeper for a given publication, it follows naturally that the language of the text targets a smaller audience. Is it conceivable that we can maintain general comprehensibility and continue to expand and refine knowledge? I could see that it's possible to write in a style with more analogies or illustrative language but I can't tell from the article if this factors into the observed trend.
trevyn 9y ago
This seems inherently linked to the increase in complexity and precision of scientific ideas, particularly over the time scale investigated (back to 1881). I certainly applaud efforts to manage this complexity (e.g. the article mentions possibly adding "lay person summaries" in addition to abstracts), but I think that increased complexity and depth of scientific results is the intended outcome. It seems analogous to these insane computer-generated proofs in mathematics -- maybe we need new tooling and approaches to make sense of them, but the fact that they exist is proof that we're discovering things and moving forward.
- FabHK 9y ago
  I don't buy that explanation - there's also just a lot of bad writing out there today. And, I'd wager, you'll find (more frequently than before) attempts to impress (and even obfuscate), rather then communicate and elucidate. Note also that your hypothesis was briefly addressed in the article: > An alternative explanation for the main finding is that the cumulative growth of scientific knowledge makes an increasingly complex language necessary. This cannot be directly tested, but if this were to fully explain the trend, we would expect a greater diversity of vocabulary as science grows more specialized. While accounting for the original finding of the increase in difficult words and of syllable count, this would not explain the increase of general scientific jargon words (e.g. 'furthermore' or 'novel', Figure 6B). Thus, this possible explanation cannot fully account for our findings.
  - kemerover 9y ago
    Is "furthermore" scientific jargon? I thought it is just a professional version of "moreover". Like, I would say "moreover" to a friend, but write "furthermore" in a letter.
  - watwut 9y ago
    I had no idea that 'furthermore' or 'novel' are scientific jargon. I have seen that frequently enough to think it is normal English word. I would use furthermore in paper, because that was the word people seemed to be using all the time.
- 9y ago
fghtr 9y ago
The concept of Research Distillation could be a solution to make the texts more accesible to scientists. https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/ https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/ via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932806
bitL 9y ago
We need a neural network to translate from a scientific to normal writing style. Only half-joking here... It can train itself on latest Deep Learning papers too!
- lstamour 9y ago
  With what source material for the normal writing style? If it trains based on news coverage all it would do is pick phrases from the abstract and maybe use a thesaurus, with no accuracy guarantees...
gervase 9y ago
Discussions of the relative merit of academia's current state, and specifically the publication process, pop up from time to time around here, so I won't rehash those points here. Additionally, I think the article's author (and other neighboring posts here) bring up valid points regarding the escalating complexity of science and potential correlations between that complexity and the written complexity required to communicate it. I think the article about the ABC conjecture [0] posted earlier today [1] is a perfect example of this. However, I would like to pose another suggestion that may play a role in this effect. It is easy to see how a paper's acceptance in a journal or conference serves as an evolutionary pressure on the author's style; in other words, one of the reward functions for a paper's style is defined by its ability to be published (since higher publication count correlates with higher funding availability, for better or for worse). With such a function in place, it makes sense that papers will start to exhibit evolutionary traits (styles) that promote survival irrespective of their practical or functional benefits. Let us also consider the committee review process as part of our environment: several humans must decide whether your paper will be published or not, based on its domain novelty. There are 4 possible outcomes: 1) Paper is novel, reviewers understand it; outcome, publication (weight=1). 2) Paper is novel, reviewers don't understand it; outcome, possible publication (weight=0.5). 3) Paper is not novel, reviewers understand it; outcome, no publication (weight=0). 4) Paper is not novel, reviewers don't understand it; outcome, possible publication (weight=0.5). Therefore, if you're publishing something, and either (A) you know it's not very novel, or (B) you're not sure how novel other people will think it will be, it's in your interest to obfuscate your paper as much as possible. Additionally, for Cases 2 & 4, the weights probably trend even higher. Human vanity may produce an outcome closer to "I don't understand it, therefore it may be over my head; I will therefore convince myself it is a good paper. Weak recommend!" at a higher rate than "I don't understand it; I will ask for clarification from the author or the rest of the committee, at the risk of appearing foolish in front of my colleagues." If these interpretations are true, then the parent's article's results are not particularly surprising, just depressing (from the perspective of "academia as human progress engine"). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206540
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
gaius 9y ago
As is the reproducibility. Mere correlation or is there a causal link? http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778
SubiculumCode 9y ago
Once upon a time a top scientists could contribute to biology, chemistry, and physics, yet today this is extremely unlikely. All the knowledge we accumulate and build on need names, structures, and nuance. You can't just throw that all away and describe what you are doing or thinking limited to a basic highschool level vocabulary. The problems we face are harder, for complex, and more esoteric than ever before, and it is amazing.
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  Albeit things like "managerial summary" (not ELI5 but quite close) are very much needed. Abstracts tend to not deliver this. More importantly, often key limitations are overlooked in both to make the research look way more groundbreaking than it really is. Caveat lector: speaking mostly for computer science and medicine.
seanwilson 9y ago
Are readability scores generally a good metric to follow when authoring content? For example, would you pay attention to it for a landing page or a blog post?
bocklund 9y ago
It looks like they only looked at abstracts. I'd argue that they should be more complex and that abstract readability don't correlate with the readability in the text. You can communicate the big ideas and importance in the necessary context in the abstract. These are built on top of many small simple ones. Back in the day 'We measured this thing' was plenty for a journal paper because there was so much disagreement that each result was novel and interesting. Now I still believe that the quality of writing has decreased, but my point is that you can have a complicated abstract for an idea that is extremely clear in the text.
- jlg23 9y ago
  > It looks like they only looked at abstracts. From the text: "We then validated abstract readability against full text readability, demonstrating that it is a suitable approximation for comparing main texts."
  - AstralStorm 9y ago
    And they perpetuate bad science by not saying how they validated it... (Either they just ran the algorithm on some full papers, which is just as worthless, or did "by inspection", which requires additional qualification and exact results they assigned.)
coliveira 9y ago
It is interesting to finally realize that a large part of the audience in this web site is really anti-science. News that in some way attack mainstream science are very much commented in a positive light, as if scientists were secretly trying to make their own work less available and obscure on purpose.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Or maybe some are defensive of bad science and can't stand to see news that attack bad practices in mainstream science to be lauded? Being anti- the bad versions/practices of something is not the same as being anti- that something. (The same way a whistleblower cop is not anti-police). There's this story Brecht wrote about a guy telling another: "I'm an enemy of newspapers. I want them closed down". To which the other guy replied, "I'm an even bigger enemy of newspapers. I want better newspapers". >as if scientists were secretly trying to make their own work less available and obscure on purpose. If that gives them an advantage (e.g. publishing lots of BS papers and advancing their careers) then they are (and we know they are, meta studies and experienced academics say and show so). There's nothing of the "Area 51/Illuminati" kind of conspiracy thinking about this, if that's what you imply. Rather it is the classic self-advancement BS that goes on since the world started, where people exploit loopholes and cheat to get ahead. That includes scientists, especially in today's publish or perish climate.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    This. I am against bad science and bad scientific writing. There is plenty of both (just follow @RealPeerReview on twitter if you need convincing, but be prepared to suffer). That doesn't mean at all that I'm against science. In fact, the opposite is the case – I'm against bad science, pseudo-science, and bad science writing because I'm so ardently in favour of good science.
    - coliveira 9y ago
      And who is to define bad science? People who, by their own words, were not able to read scientific papers because they are "difficult to understand"? I am not saying that the specific language used in scientific literature is an advantage, but also doesn't constitute a problem in itself. Unless you are able to read those papers and point out where the "bad science" is, this is just a vacuous statement. Also, pointing at failure points in the peer review process is ridiculous. This is not religion where you need to uphold every word. Science is made with lots of ideas that, looked from far ahead, are incorrect. "How did that ever cleared the review process"? Well those reviews only cover the minimum necessary for something to be published, it is not a guarantee that the contents are correct. It is the social process of science that takes care of that.
rdlecler1 9y ago
There's strong selection for obfuscation. If you make your research easy to understand it's easier for peer reviewers to poke holes in it. If you make it difficult to understand then peer reviewer don't want to look dumb by asking too many questions. Just make sure you sound smart.
Kepler-431c 9y ago
I'm building a site (not launched yet) to try to help with this problem: https://www.wikipaper.org https://www.wikipaper.org It's not just readability that's a problem, it's also that relevant code, data, etc are scattered all over the internet. Another problem is that many people struggle with english which is the defacto language for research. This introduces two problems: first, one must learn to speak english, then, one must learn how to trawl through academicese. There have been various similar projects to wikipaper in the past, but one of the reasons that they fail is that not many researchers have the spare time to contribute to a project like this. I spoke to the guys running Google Scholar and they told me this is the biggest problem. I believe I have an innovative way to solve this problem however, anyone who wants more details please get in touch. I believe that making it easier to understand research going on in neighboring fields will dramatically increase the rate at which research is performed.

82 points by gfredtech 9y ago

I suspect that today scientific texts are more frequently written by non-native English speakers and that technical jargon can be more precisely defined and understood in terms of non-English languages. It is also worth noting that scientific terms of 100 years ago are often more main stream, e.g. quantum mechanics, relativity, uncertainty, etc.

deleted 9y ago
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trollopTheJope 9y ago
thank you for sharing your suspicions
krick 9y ago
I'm pretty sure this is not the case. Scientific texts are usually awfully bad in any language I speak, including 2 languages that are my native. In fact, "scientific paper style" language is so distinct, that it can be easily applied to a paper that is not "scientific" per se, essentially obfuscating it. It seems to be very unpopular opinion here on HN, but it seems clear to me, that academia has become some kind of patalogical structure, which exists to exists — essentially an organism. It feeds on government and student's money, as long as it can seems credible and necessary to the outside world; and people within this structure can live as long, as they show that they are not "slacking" somehow — publishing papers, giving lectures — but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result. Form has become more important than the essence. So, here we have it: the form of a "scientific paper".
- spaceseaman 9y ago
  The casual nature with which you dismiss thousands of people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of academic knowledge is frustrating and incredibly childish. Like seriously? Do you think all of us PhDs just sit around and laugh about how dumb the government is while planning how we can make more useless papers? Do you think grad students just train to become better bullshitters? Like what kind of hole do you live in where any of that even appears close to reality. Seems to me you just tried reading a couple papers, got confused, and decided to justify your own intelligence by claiming their hard work and advancements in the field were pointless. > but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result Stop talking out of your rear end. I want to produce a result. My advisor wants to produce a result. We all want to have meaning in our lives. EDIT: As just a casual example of the importance of academia, look at the Deep Learning boom. First researched around 1960, only now becoming practical and useful. It's almost as if the things academics study need time and a lot of work to actually come to fruition. Research level study is highly expensive for very little real gains. This has always been the case. It takes a long-long time for the investments into research to make sense, but when they do, the advancements are completely game-changing.
  - gaius 9y ago
    The ratio of PhDs awarded annually to tenure track positions that opens up suggests that a lot of activity in the sector isn't leading anywhere.
    - spaceseaman 9y ago
      It's almost as if most research doesn't go anywhere. If I put you in a dark room, and ask you to find a way to light it, how many times will you fail to find the switch? Oh wait, I lied. There's not actually a switch, but there might be a candle in that general direction. Maybe. That's how little we have to go off of. That's how empty any information on your study is. I don't think people really understand how hard this type of work is. Research is a purely exploratory and creative work. Like art, science requires time, patience, and many many failures. You don't just get a bunch of eureka-Einsteins that come out of MIT day one knocking down Theorems and discovering new physical laws. That's just not humanly possible and it's ridiculous if you think it'll ever work that way I am perfectly willing to admit that the vast majority of research and PhD's went nowhere and will continue to go nowhere for a long time. But that doesn't mean they're useless. Research requires exploration. It requires trial and error. It is highly inefficient and does not fit well in a consumerist society like ours, but this is the way that works best for us so far. If you have some better idea, then why don't you go out and do it? How are you going to get a bunch of incredibly intelligent, creative, and independent people funded and provided for in a society that values immediate results over long term achievements? I'm not arguing the academia system is perfect. Any one knows it's screwed up beyond belief. But it's not out of malice. We're not purposely trying to make the world worse, or something ridiculous like that. You have many people who care a lot about the science, who need to eat and sleep and need money to do that. Sometimes the money goes to their heads, sometimes their massive egos get the better of them, but do you seriously think we don't care about science? You'd have to be an idiot to do a PhD for the money or the fame. Why do you think we put 7+ years of our lives into stuff like this? So most PhDs don't actually get tenured positions. What are you actually trying to say? Are you saying there aren't enough tenured positions? Or are you implying that these PhDs don't deserve tenured positions? Do you have any evidence for either of those claims? Because otherwise you're just participating in more armchair speculation.
- im3w1l 9y ago
  I think the reason that people prioritize the form is because of a kind of cargo cult. The form is followed because that's how it's always been and it has worked so far. And people are scared that if the form is changed it will have unexpected consequences.
  - coliveira 9y ago
    All this discussion doesn't consider the fact that papers are written for specific audience: scientists in a very narrow field. What seems to be gibberish for you is perfectly understandable for people working in that area, otherwise it wouldn't be even published in the first place. Now, it is true that it would be nice to have this translated into laymen words, but the problem is that scientists usually have better things to do...
    - im3w1l 9y ago
      I found your post pretty condescending. I have read and understood many papers. Even written one.
- SubiculumCode 9y ago
  The facts are the opposite really. Today we are collecting so much data that we don't have enough time to actually write it all up. That is why we beyond busy. And to your others assertions. Utter hogwash.
- CuriouslyC 9y ago
  Academia is absolutely necrotic. Between the fact that good scientists spend most of their time writing grants, the fact that most scientists spend their life as eternal postdocs, the rigged publishing game, the increasing balkanization of fields, the fact that most people are trying to protect the status quo rather than overturn it, and the goal of publishing rather than actually discovering, things look very grim. I think that government needs to cut back on grants, and instead provide better incentives for corporations to do open access basic research. This would still have the problem of producing somewhat obfuscated science, but in general it would push things towards being more interdisciplinary and functional, since corporations could increase profitability by leveraging synergies between basic and applied research.

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chwahoo 9y ago

"Furthermore", "novel", "distinct" are scientific jargon that reduce readability? Seems like a non-problem to me.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Usually it is the omissions that hurt. Rarely bad sentence structure. Harder jargon sometimes does so too and especially custom underdefined notation.

payne92 9y ago

I like'd PG's tweet about this: "Possible explanation: papers are becoming less how you communicate ideas, and more how you register work to get credit for it." https://twitter.com/i/web/status/906075608181915649 https://twitter.com/i/web/status/906075608181915649

ahartmetz 9y ago
The old problem "when you turn a metric into a goal, it ceases to be a good metric". Scientists are rewarded for churning out a large number of fragmentary (if you have a really good idea, it's good for more than one paper), shoddily written papers to collect citation points. "The stuff between the formulas" is not something authors really care about. I noticed the awful writing in new (physics) papers when I was still in university and had to read a paper occasionally. I was always relieved to find a paper from before roughly 1980. They are so much better written. Older papers are often better written than most textbooks while recent papers are much, much worse. It is not just due to the subject matter changing. Reportedly, journals also used to have paid copy editors. Today - well, you have heard about Elsevier and other publishers, right? They don't only seem to increase prices to increase their profits.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Writing ability is on the wane in general. In professional settings, IMO this is mostly due to the disappearance of secretaries and clerical staff, lousy education and more non-native speakers. A long time ago as an intern, I had to re-typeset and format some reports published by a .gov since the 1910s for reprint and web publishing. You would see variations in style, but the reports started getting worse in the early 80s, and are almost incomprehensible today.
  - ahartmetz 9y ago
    It may also be because university education used to be for those with a great interest in science, and I guess for some reasonably intelligent upper class folks with nothing better to do. The first group had the motivation, the second group the habit and education to express themselves well. Today it is for those who want to get a good job. The education for a job majority lowers the standards for everyone. Btw I'm a middle class guy who did it mostly for job prospects and such, so...

karmakaze 9y ago

If you consider that current areas of research is both broader in overall and narrower/deeper for a given publication, it follows naturally that the language of the text targets a smaller audience. Is it conceivable that we can maintain general comprehensibility and continue to expand and refine knowledge? I could see that it's possible to write in a style with more analogies or illustrative language but I can't tell from the article if this factors into the observed trend.

trevyn 9y ago

This seems inherently linked to the increase in complexity and precision of scientific ideas, particularly over the time scale investigated (back to 1881). I certainly applaud efforts to manage this complexity (e.g. the article mentions possibly adding "lay person summaries" in addition to abstracts), but I think that increased complexity and depth of scientific results is the intended outcome. It seems analogous to these insane computer-generated proofs in mathematics -- maybe we need new tooling and approaches to make sense of them, but the fact that they exist is proof that we're discovering things and moving forward.

FabHK 9y ago
I don't buy that explanation - there's also just a lot of bad writing out there today. And, I'd wager, you'll find (more frequently than before) attempts to impress (and even obfuscate), rather then communicate and elucidate. Note also that your hypothesis was briefly addressed in the article: > An alternative explanation for the main finding is that the cumulative growth of scientific knowledge makes an increasingly complex language necessary. This cannot be directly tested, but if this were to fully explain the trend, we would expect a greater diversity of vocabulary as science grows more specialized. While accounting for the original finding of the increase in difficult words and of syllable count, this would not explain the increase of general scientific jargon words (e.g. 'furthermore' or 'novel', Figure 6B). Thus, this possible explanation cannot fully account for our findings.
- kemerover 9y ago
  Is "furthermore" scientific jargon? I thought it is just a professional version of "moreover". Like, I would say "moreover" to a friend, but write "furthermore" in a letter.
- watwut 9y ago
  I had no idea that 'furthermore' or 'novel' are scientific jargon. I have seen that frequently enough to think it is normal English word. I would use furthermore in paper, because that was the word people seemed to be using all the time.
9y ago

fghtr 9y ago

The concept of Research Distillation could be a solution to make the texts more accesible to scientists. https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/ https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/ via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932806

bitL 9y ago

We need a neural network to translate from a scientific to normal writing style. Only half-joking here... It can train itself on latest Deep Learning papers too!

lstamour 9y ago
With what source material for the normal writing style? If it trains based on news coverage all it would do is pick phrases from the abstract and maybe use a thesaurus, with no accuracy guarantees...

gervase 9y ago

Discussions of the relative merit of academia's current state, and specifically the publication process, pop up from time to time around here, so I won't rehash those points here. Additionally, I think the article's author (and other neighboring posts here) bring up valid points regarding the escalating complexity of science and potential correlations between that complexity and the written complexity required to communicate it. I think the article about the ABC conjecture [0] posted earlier today [1] is a perfect example of this. However, I would like to pose another suggestion that may play a role in this effect. It is easy to see how a paper's acceptance in a journal or conference serves as an evolutionary pressure on the author's style; in other words, one of the reward functions for a paper's style is defined by its ability to be published (since higher publication count correlates with higher funding availability, for better or for worse). With such a function in place, it makes sense that papers will start to exhibit evolutionary traits (styles) that promote survival irrespective of their practical or functional benefits. Let us also consider the committee review process as part of our environment: several humans must decide whether your paper will be published or not, based on its domain novelty. There are 4 possible outcomes: 1) Paper is novel, reviewers understand it; outcome, publication (weight=1). 2) Paper is novel, reviewers don't understand it; outcome, possible publication (weight=0.5). 3) Paper is not novel, reviewers understand it; outcome, no publication (weight=0). 4) Paper is not novel, reviewers don't understand it; outcome, possible publication (weight=0.5). Therefore, if you're publishing something, and either (A) you know it's not very novel, or (B) you're not sure how novel other people will think it will be, it's in your interest to obfuscate your paper as much as possible. Additionally, for Cases 2 & 4, the weights probably trend even higher. Human vanity may produce an outcome closer to "I don't understand it, therefore it may be over my head; I will therefore convince myself it is a good paper. Weak recommend!" at a higher rate than "I don't understand it; I will ask for clarification from the author or the rest of the committee, at the risk of appearing foolish in front of my colleagues." If these interpretations are true, then the parent's article's results are not particularly surprising, just depressing (from the perspective of "academia as human progress engine"). [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abc_conjecture [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206540 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15206540

SubiculumCode 9y ago

gaius 9y ago

As is the reproducibility. Mere correlation or is there a causal link? http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778 http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39054778

SubiculumCode 9y ago

Once upon a time a top scientists could contribute to biology, chemistry, and physics, yet today this is extremely unlikely. All the knowledge we accumulate and build on need names, structures, and nuance. You can't just throw that all away and describe what you are doing or thinking limited to a basic highschool level vocabulary. The problems we face are harder, for complex, and more esoteric than ever before, and it is amazing.

AstralStorm 9y ago
Albeit things like "managerial summary" (not ELI5 but quite close) are very much needed. Abstracts tend to not deliver this. More importantly, often key limitations are overlooked in both to make the research look way more groundbreaking than it really is. Caveat lector: speaking mostly for computer science and medicine.

seanwilson 9y ago

Are readability scores generally a good metric to follow when authoring content? For example, would you pay attention to it for a landing page or a blog post?

bocklund 9y ago

It looks like they only looked at abstracts. I'd argue that they should be more complex and that abstract readability don't correlate with the readability in the text. You can communicate the big ideas and importance in the necessary context in the abstract. These are built on top of many small simple ones. Back in the day 'We measured this thing' was plenty for a journal paper because there was so much disagreement that each result was novel and interesting. Now I still believe that the quality of writing has decreased, but my point is that you can have a complicated abstract for an idea that is extremely clear in the text.

jlg23 9y ago
> It looks like they only looked at abstracts. From the text: "We then validated abstract readability against full text readability, demonstrating that it is a suitable approximation for comparing main texts."
- AstralStorm 9y ago
  And they perpetuate bad science by not saying how they validated it... (Either they just ran the algorithm on some full papers, which is just as worthless, or did "by inspection", which requires additional qualification and exact results they assigned.)

coliveira 9y ago

It is interesting to finally realize that a large part of the audience in this web site is really anti-science. News that in some way attack mainstream science are very much commented in a positive light, as if scientists were secretly trying to make their own work less available and obscure on purpose.

coldtea 9y ago
Or maybe some are defensive of bad science and can't stand to see news that attack bad practices in mainstream science to be lauded? Being anti- the bad versions/practices of something is not the same as being anti- that something. (The same way a whistleblower cop is not anti-police). There's this story Brecht wrote about a guy telling another: "I'm an enemy of newspapers. I want them closed down". To which the other guy replied, "I'm an even bigger enemy of newspapers. I want better newspapers". >as if scientists were secretly trying to make their own work less available and obscure on purpose. If that gives them an advantage (e.g. publishing lots of BS papers and advancing their careers) then they are (and we know they are, meta studies and experienced academics say and show so). There's nothing of the "Area 51/Illuminati" kind of conspiracy thinking about this, if that's what you imply. Rather it is the classic self-advancement BS that goes on since the world started, where people exploit loopholes and cheat to get ahead. That includes scientists, especially in today's publish or perish climate.
- FabHK 9y ago
  This. I am against bad science and bad scientific writing. There is plenty of both (just follow @RealPeerReview on twitter if you need convincing, but be prepared to suffer). That doesn't mean at all that I'm against science. In fact, the opposite is the case – I'm against bad science, pseudo-science, and bad science writing because I'm so ardently in favour of good science.
  - coliveira 9y ago
    And who is to define bad science? People who, by their own words, were not able to read scientific papers because they are "difficult to understand"? I am not saying that the specific language used in scientific literature is an advantage, but also doesn't constitute a problem in itself. Unless you are able to read those papers and point out where the "bad science" is, this is just a vacuous statement. Also, pointing at failure points in the peer review process is ridiculous. This is not religion where you need to uphold every word. Science is made with lots of ideas that, looked from far ahead, are incorrect. "How did that ever cleared the review process"? Well those reviews only cover the minimum necessary for something to be published, it is not a guarantee that the contents are correct. It is the social process of science that takes care of that.

rdlecler1 9y ago

There's strong selection for obfuscation. If you make your research easy to understand it's easier for peer reviewers to poke holes in it. If you make it difficult to understand then peer reviewer don't want to look dumb by asking too many questions. Just make sure you sound smart.

Kepler-431c 9y ago

I'm building a site (not launched yet) to try to help with this problem: https://www.wikipaper.org https://www.wikipaper.org It's not just readability that's a problem, it's also that relevant code, data, etc are scattered all over the internet. Another problem is that many people struggle with english which is the defacto language for research. This introduces two problems: first, one must learn to speak english, then, one must learn how to trawl through academicese. There have been various similar projects to wikipaper in the past, but one of the reasons that they fail is that not many researchers have the spare time to contribute to a project like this. I spoke to the guys running Google Scholar and they told me this is the biggest problem. I believe I have an innovative way to solve this problem however, anyone who wants more details please get in touch. I believe that making it easier to understand research going on in neighboring fields will dramatically increase the rate at which research is performed.