12 ms·

Headline is waaaay overblown, but not all of it is total hyperbole -- checkout out arxiv and try to read the abstract from just about any paper. It's basically

• hgtr 7y ago
  I did some undergraduate research and ended up getting published. My initial drafts were written with prose so that I (and hopefully any novice) could understand. However, my professor wasn’t happy with it so I got some help from one of his grad students to re-write it. By the end of it I could barely understand my own paper. IMO the final paper had too much technical jargon which was convoluting some simple concepts. Kinda made me disenchanted with the academic world. Still have to give credit to my prof and the grad student, without their edits it probably wouldn’t have been published.
  • echelon 7y ago
    This is one of the reasons why I pursued engineering instead of a hard science. Mathematics in particular feels like an ivory tower with a bunch of gatekeeping. Better language and grammar around core concepts could improve accessibility, but few in the field that I've encountered seem to care about that. Biology and chemistry are a bit better, but there are still improvements that could be made. You can't easily go from zero to biochem or ochem, and I don't think that has to be the case. Gen chem and gen bio just suck at presenting themes and concepts and instead focus on being a smorgasbord of facts (that you later have to amend or unlearn). Computer science and electrical engineering are a walk in the park by comparison. We have all sorts of interactive tools and visualizations of algorithms and analysis. We keep refining and making the onboarding process easier and more accessible.
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  • hannob 7y ago
    So I find this interesting, because it seems to confirm a suspicion I held. I "only" did some undergrad math during my computer science (but due to a lack of specialization at my university back then it was "real math", i.e. we took the same courses as the math students). My impression often was that a lot of this stuff isn't so hard if you "get to it", but it's clouded in a lot of complicated language that makes it sound harder than it really is. I never dared to postulate that this is a more general problem of math, but your words sound like that's exactly what is happening. Do you think there's a way forward to make math more accessible by using simpler language without sacrificing correctness?
    • mathgenius 7y ago
      Absolutely. It's a problem with academia in general. Academics don't get rewarded for explaining things in an easy to understand way. Moreover, it is often a huge amount of work to distill results down like this. And if you succeed the response you may get is "well that is obvious". Anyway, this is my counter argument to the "formalization of mathematics": why don't we incentivize people to bring some clarity to the exposition? If mathematics is suffering from faulty proofs, then I have little sympathy. Make it simpler, organize the concepts. Muscular calculations only go so far.
      • ncmncm 7y ago
        In other fields, writing survey articles is (or was, recently) an appreciated activity. Survey articles are explicitly supposed to bring people up on the important results and current state of a subject.
      • skela224 7y ago
        There's the idea that pure math papers should not have a "Conclusion" section, where the author summarizes what has been done and says a few informal words. This doesn't seem to help the exposition but is nonetheless prevalent: if you haven't paid attention to the proofs and derivation, they aren't going to retell what happened in plain plain language. e.g. look at this advice from the academia stackexchange, to a young aspiring mathematician: "If you're relatively young and inexperienced and hoping for best results on the rapid publication of your work in strong journals, I would stick pretty mercilessly to the format: (i) strong introduction motivating your work and explaining clearly the value added both in the results themselves and the techniques of proof and (ii) the rest of the paper contains careful proofs of all the results, in a very clear, linear, easy to follow fashion, e.g. "Section A.B: Proof of Lemma C".
  • simion314 7y ago
    Are you sure though that your extra stuff was actually on correct an on point? AFAIK in math you have the primary notions, the axioms then all the previous definitions and proofs, maybe I am imagining somethng different then what actually happened though, an example would be good but it may not be possible for you to remember or express it in a comment here.
  • Silhouette 7y ago
    IMO the final paper had too much technical jargon which was convoluting some simple concepts. This is symptomatic of IMHO the biggest single problem with the world of mathematics today. This discipline should be about developing ideas based on rigorous foundations and logic, which is a useful and important purpose. Once you have understood those ideas, even "advanced" results often seem quite simple and intuitive, and we can take that understanding and apply it to other work if helps us to make useful progress. However, the amount of needlessly obscure terminology, poor notation and just plain bad writing in formal papers make the whole field absurdly inaccessible, even to many who might have no trouble understanding the underlying concepts and important results. Just imagine what would happen if we tried to write engineering specs or software the way postgraduate mathematics research is done. We'd be trying to debug source code where every identifier was a single character, taken from one of three or four different alphabets, with several of them looking similar enough to mistake one for another, with a bunch of combining accent modifiers on top that were used to fundamentally change the semantics of the program, interspersed with comments by someone who needs a remedial class in basic writing skills, full of technical terminology that is defined in terms of other technical terminology from other software packages, except that sometimes the meaning is subtly different in this context but that isn't noted anywhere on the screen at the time, resulting in needing to spend half an hour doing a depth-first-search of all the definitions only to find that a function whose only identifier is the name of the developer who wrote the second version (because the first person to work on it already has another function bearing their name) is actually equivalent to what a programmer would write as const DAYS_IN_WEEK := 7 I write this as someone who studied mathematics to a high level and has touched on the field many times since in connection with heavily mathematical software development. It's the worst sort of closed-world gate-keeping, and we could do so much better, but sadly inertia and vested interests are not our friends in this matter.
• hiphop 7y ago
  > I'm almost done with an undergraduate degree in math and basically have no idea what ~90% of the research is about Find a grad student who are just about done with their studies in, say, analysis and the odds are they understand jacksquat about anything in current research in Number Theory either. This post is in support of your point :)
• knzhou 7y ago
  That doesn’t mean that it’s wrong, it means that you need to read more. In a lot of fields, undergraduate material doesn’t qualify you to read papers, a PhD does. If all papers actually were written to undergraduate level, many would be 500 pages long. Who has time to write a book-length exposition of the basics of their field every time they publish? I mean, have you ever published a technical work? If so, did you go out of your way to make it completely accessible to high schoolers? If you didn’t, you get why professors don’t do the same for undergrads.
  • thanhhaimai 7y ago
    The above statement is true with the assumption that the topic being discussed is truly above the level of understanding for undergraduates. For the majority of the papers, that assumption is not true though. Papers are hard to read has more to do with the idea that if it's not filled with jargons, its chance of getting published is greatly reduced. Papers are not rewarded for being easy to understand. People/organizations get rewarded for publishing "complicate" papers. That misalignment is the issue.
    • knzhou 7y ago
      Depends on the field. Many CS papers can be understood by undergrads because CS is a very young and very broad field; the path to the frontier in any direction is short. Theoretical physics and math are not like that. They have been building cumulatively for centuries.
      • Silhouette 7y ago
        Theoretical physics and math are not like that. They have been building cumulatively for centuries. For state-of-the-art research in obscure specialisms, of course you're right. However, numerous papers and books cover more mundane subjects and there is no good reason they could not be readily accessible to anyone with an undergraduate-level background or at least a masters delving a bit deeper into the field of interest. Often the problem isn't dumbing down the material, it's simply poor communication skills. Put another way, while our cumulative understanding of mathematics now covers a very broad range of areas, that doesn't necessarily mean the depth to reach a good understanding of any particular specialism has increased at the same rate. On the contrary, given that even the most specialised of theories must be something that an individual can come to understand and build upon within a single career, there is an inherent limit to how deep our understanding of the subject can go. That limit fundamentally depends on how efficiently we can build the layers of more elementary understanding on which the start of the art must rest.
• bob1029 7y ago
  I feel the same way when I look at many of these papers. I get that I don't have a post doctorate in super math or whatever the bleeding edge academic ivory tower game is these days, but at the same time I feel that if 90% of the research cannot convey any practical description of real-world implications, or at least how it relates to other abstract things that DO have real-world implications, maybe there is some BS house-of-cards fantasy game going on. From what I understand, there are some financial benefits to cranking out research papers. Perhaps researchers are incentivized to build layer upon layer of abstraction so they can spin any tale they desire in order to turn a quick buck? What better field than math? The purest and most non-tangible of fields. Another perspective I have on this - Virtually all computer technology or software papers I read are typically understandable to some degree, despite my not having the highest credentials in my field. It would seem the constraint of "if this is in a compsci paper, it needs some reference implementation pseudocode" seems to help keep people honest. If the computer can run it, at least you can view things in a more concrete (albeit still somewhat abstract) manner. Especially imperative code examples. These quickly take very abstract algorithmic concepts and transform them into a step-by-step understanding. If the paper is total bunk, you can usually tell pretty quickly from the results on the computer. Automated proofs, where feasible, seem like a very reasonable requirement for published math papers. My ignorance at the higher levels of this field fails to inform me if all math papers could be proven automatically, or if there is some more 'complex' realm of reasoning unsuitable for classical/quantum/etc verification. Perhaps this should be a good constraint regardless - If you can't implement your algorithm/proof on a computer, where are you headed with it anyways? Surely piling another 500 papers worth of layers on top isn't going to move you any closer to a practical outcome.
• imglorp 7y ago
  Software is very much in crisis because of this exact problem. Most of us build on top of a mountain of existing work; sometimes just setting a pebble on top and we have a new thing. But no human alive has seen, could remember, or could understand, each and every behavior down in that mountain, from pixels on the screen to pulses on the phy all the way to gates inside their processors. So you read about the APIs you need; you set your pebble down with a little glue or duct tape; you hope you've connected it correctly; you hope the rest of the mountain works how you want; you hope you didn't miss any use cases for interfacing to the mountain; and you hope it doesn't have any undocumented surprises. Abelson and Sussman called this engineering by poking (1). Of course, if you want to make something work fast with minimal work, this is great, it's the component future we dreamed about. But it also means we are clueless. 1. http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/5335
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  • dorchadas 7y ago
    In this case, it likely applies to every aspect of modern day life. Man is no longer a generalist, and we are forced to build upon the foundations others have put, and hope they work.
    • casefields 7y ago
      No one human knows how to make a pencil: https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/ https://fee.org/resources/i-pencil/
      • imglorp 7y ago
        Beautifully put, with afterward from Milton Freidman putting it into context.