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I'd say this is generally not true, at least in math. There's definitely poor notation and misnomers that come from tradition, but it's hardly deliberate as "ob

I'd say this is generally not true, at least in math. There's definitely poor notation and misnomers that come from tradition, but it's hardly deliberate as "obfuscation" implies.

mkl 6y ago
I'm not sure I agree (I have a PhD in maths). There are many maths papers and books I've tried to understand where that seems to have been deliberately made more difficult than it needs to be. Sure, you could argue that I didn't have the necessary prerequisite knowledge at that point, or that the authors simply weren't good at explaining things, but I do get the impression that it's sometimes more than that. Using specialised meanings for words without definition or reference (words that are used for other purposes elsewhere so they can't be searched for) is a key problem, as is the same with notation, and as is leaving out crucial steps. If you're already in the know, those things are probably clear.
- memexy 6y ago
  But that sounds like bad exposition. What benefit would any author get from purposely obfuscating what they're trying to share?
  - mkl 6y ago
    Could well be, and I have no definitive evidence otherwise, but sometimes it's hard to imagine anyone being that bad at exposition. Some "benefits" might be seeming smarter and more knowledgeable than they are, making it harder to exactly replicate their methods (most relevant in applied areas), or citations by intimidation ("I don't understand this, but it seems impressive and relevant, so I better cite it.").
    - elbear 6y ago
      They all sound plausible and likely. There are people obfuscating knowledge for all the reasons you mentioned. At the same time, it doesn't mean there's a concerted effort to obfuscate mathematics. Explaining things is hard, because you have to create a clear picture of the audience in your mind. Then, you have to draw the lines between what they know and what you want to introduce. The curse of knowledge is a big obstacle here.
  - kxyvr 6y ago
    Every author has their own motivations, but I will echo what the parent has expressed that often, if not the majority of the time, authors are making their papers far more difficult to read than they need be. To that, I'll add anecdote. Some years back, I had a fight with a coauthor on a paper who wanted to remove the majority of the substeps within a proof. He believed that it was condescending to include such material and that any interested reader should be able to derive it for themselves. And, in fact, he asked a colleague in the room at the time who agreed with him. I stated flatly that as the primary author that I could not understand nor complete these proofs without these steps, so the material stays. I contend that at least in this one particular case a combination of exclusivity and arrogance led to an attempt at obfuscation. Remember, publishing isn't just about sharing knowledge. It's also a way to posture, advertise, build a brand, and get grant money. Beyond that, mathematicians are still people with all the imperfections that implies.
- vertbhrtn 6y ago
  Modern math papers also love cryptic symbolism. I've been doing some research and been reading papers on a certain topic from 50s to these days. The difference in math presentation is startling: a paper from 50s really tries to explain things, e.g. it uses simple partial derivatives and some simplifications because that's just enough for the paper; on the other hand a paper from 2020 describes the very same math as a cryptic sequence of triangles and dots, and the reader really need to be familiar with the context to understand what this compressed formula expands into. I believe the main motivation behind this is the desire to look sophisticated, so anyone reading the author's paper would be impressed at a glance with the complexity of the math.
  - enriquto 6y ago
    Can you point us to that specific pair of papers? I have never seen a debauchery of triangles of dots used to write a pde.
  - augustt 6y ago
    Like ∇^2 u = Δu = f? It's not really cryptic, it's taught in multivariable. And it's not done to look sophisticated, it's so that you can instantly recognize that it's Laplace, or Poisson, etc. If I tell you B = (dA_z/dy - dA_y/dz)i + (dA_x/dz - dA_z/dx)j + (dA_y/dx - dA_x/dy)k do you instantly see what operator is applied? That's why you just write B = ∇×A. People presenting ideas in shorter notation is not showing a lack of progress - usually it's the opposite. In old optimization papers people would write out the entire normal equations, entry by entry. Not really insightful at all, compared to A'Ax = A'b.
    - StandardFuture 6y ago
      This seems to be presenting a false dichotomy. B = (dA_z/dy - dA_y/dz)i + (dA_x/dz - dA_z/dx)j + (dA_y/dx - dA_x/dy)k and B = ∇×A are not the only ways, out of all possible strings, to encode that information. This is the power of modern programming languages. They are mathematics with much better syntax.
    - vertbhrtn 6y ago
- Viliam1234 6y ago
  Most people suck at explaining. So the fact that most scientists suck at explaining is like... yeah, that's what naturally happens, unless you actively reward good explanations. The perfect case would be if someone is great at research and also great at explaining. But great skills are rare, and specific combinations of great skills are even more rare. So you will have a scientist or two who are great explainers at the same time, but then you have a lot of scientists who are great at research but suck at explaining, and also a lot of people who are great at explaining but suck at research. How does academia reward them? The ones with both skills will get the highest rewards: they will invent lots of cool stuff and describe it clearly, so they will get many citations. But there are only a few such people per generation. The ones who are good researchers but suck at explanation can still invent something and publish the type of paper you complain about; and they will get a (smaller) reward for doing so. The ones who are good at explaining but suck at research... will probably be fired. There are a few things that a person whose only skill is explaining could do in academia. They wouldn't get a reward for explaining someone else's paper clearly, but they could get a reward for writing a meta-review that would explain multiple papers clearly. In theory, their scientific contribution would be in comparing the papers, but in practice, hopefully even people who only needed one of the papers would cite them as a reward for making it easier to understand. -- I don't know if this would actually be sufficient to survive academically. People who are good at explaining can also make money by writing popular textbooks. Question is, whether there is a sufficient demand for a popular textbook explaining some obscure math.
  - gallegojaime 6y ago
    Explainers-first shouldn't be fired if they make up a small percentage, because they do a wonderful job without the bulk of resources. I'm not sure if explainers-first are the minority, though. After all, it's much easier to review than to create. And we do want new research.
    - StandardFuture 6y ago
      Firstly, let's not fall for a false dichotomy. There is likely a simple equilibrium of review and creativity that must be maintained for an optimally healthy scientific community. Obviously, the old style of numerous-journals + publish-or-perish mentality was unhealthy implementations of a scientific system. But, I would move away from papers entirely. They hold no redeeming values over alternatives like a git repository published publicly with an "issues" forum e.g., GitHub, etc. This needs to absolutely become the new standard, and we need to get rid of papers and journals, both physically and digitally, in their entirety. They have zero redeeming factors at this point in time except to boost the ego of the published. Quality control can easily be decentralized and available to everyone using something like GitHub. We know this because that is literally what the security and trust of open-source software is predicated on: putting everything in the open.
tasogare 6y ago
Same for the Chinese characters. The complexity (number of characters and their different readings and meanings) stems from all the historical cruft the system accumulated for millennia, not something purposefully engineered to being obscure. There was lot of work made to keep the thing usable. The other thing is at the time yes, people who could read and write was a small minority. That have been the case in other societies with writing too. Not because of a cabal making it difficult but because getting an education was very costly.

I'd say this is generally not true, at least in math. There's definitely poor notation and misnomers that come from tradition, but it's hardly deliberate as "obfuscation" implies.

mkl 6y ago

I'm not sure I agree (I have a PhD in maths). There are many maths papers and books I've tried to understand where that seems to have been deliberately made more difficult than it needs to be. Sure, you could argue that I didn't have the necessary prerequisite knowledge at that point, or that the authors simply weren't good at explaining things, but I do get the impression that it's sometimes more than that. Using specialised meanings for words without definition or reference (words that are used for other purposes elsewhere so they can't be searched for) is a key problem, as is the same with notation, and as is leaving out crucial steps. If you're already in the know, those things are probably clear.

memexy 6y ago
But that sounds like bad exposition. What benefit would any author get from purposely obfuscating what they're trying to share?
- mkl 6y ago
  Could well be, and I have no definitive evidence otherwise, but sometimes it's hard to imagine anyone being that bad at exposition. Some "benefits" might be seeming smarter and more knowledgeable than they are, making it harder to exactly replicate their methods (most relevant in applied areas), or citations by intimidation ("I don't understand this, but it seems impressive and relevant, so I better cite it.").
  - elbear 6y ago
    They all sound plausible and likely. There are people obfuscating knowledge for all the reasons you mentioned. At the same time, it doesn't mean there's a concerted effort to obfuscate mathematics. Explaining things is hard, because you have to create a clear picture of the audience in your mind. Then, you have to draw the lines between what they know and what you want to introduce. The curse of knowledge is a big obstacle here.
- kxyvr 6y ago
  Every author has their own motivations, but I will echo what the parent has expressed that often, if not the majority of the time, authors are making their papers far more difficult to read than they need be. To that, I'll add anecdote. Some years back, I had a fight with a coauthor on a paper who wanted to remove the majority of the substeps within a proof. He believed that it was condescending to include such material and that any interested reader should be able to derive it for themselves. And, in fact, he asked a colleague in the room at the time who agreed with him. I stated flatly that as the primary author that I could not understand nor complete these proofs without these steps, so the material stays. I contend that at least in this one particular case a combination of exclusivity and arrogance led to an attempt at obfuscation. Remember, publishing isn't just about sharing knowledge. It's also a way to posture, advertise, build a brand, and get grant money. Beyond that, mathematicians are still people with all the imperfections that implies.
vertbhrtn 6y ago
Modern math papers also love cryptic symbolism. I've been doing some research and been reading papers on a certain topic from 50s to these days. The difference in math presentation is startling: a paper from 50s really tries to explain things, e.g. it uses simple partial derivatives and some simplifications because that's just enough for the paper; on the other hand a paper from 2020 describes the very same math as a cryptic sequence of triangles and dots, and the reader really need to be familiar with the context to understand what this compressed formula expands into. I believe the main motivation behind this is the desire to look sophisticated, so anyone reading the author's paper would be impressed at a glance with the complexity of the math.
- enriquto 6y ago
  Can you point us to that specific pair of papers? I have never seen a debauchery of triangles of dots used to write a pde.
- augustt 6y ago
  Like ∇^2 u = Δu = f? It's not really cryptic, it's taught in multivariable. And it's not done to look sophisticated, it's so that you can instantly recognize that it's Laplace, or Poisson, etc. If I tell you B = (dA_z/dy - dA_y/dz)i + (dA_x/dz - dA_z/dx)j + (dA_y/dx - dA_x/dy)k do you instantly see what operator is applied? That's why you just write B = ∇×A. People presenting ideas in shorter notation is not showing a lack of progress - usually it's the opposite. In old optimization papers people would write out the entire normal equations, entry by entry. Not really insightful at all, compared to A'Ax = A'b.
  - StandardFuture 6y ago
    This seems to be presenting a false dichotomy. B = (dA_z/dy - dA_y/dz)i + (dA_x/dz - dA_z/dx)j + (dA_y/dx - dA_x/dy)k and B = ∇×A are not the only ways, out of all possible strings, to encode that information. This is the power of modern programming languages. They are mathematics with much better syntax.
  - vertbhrtn 6y ago
Viliam1234 6y ago
Most people suck at explaining. So the fact that most scientists suck at explaining is like... yeah, that's what naturally happens, unless you actively reward good explanations. The perfect case would be if someone is great at research and also great at explaining. But great skills are rare, and specific combinations of great skills are even more rare. So you will have a scientist or two who are great explainers at the same time, but then you have a lot of scientists who are great at research but suck at explaining, and also a lot of people who are great at explaining but suck at research. How does academia reward them? The ones with both skills will get the highest rewards: they will invent lots of cool stuff and describe it clearly, so they will get many citations. But there are only a few such people per generation. The ones who are good researchers but suck at explanation can still invent something and publish the type of paper you complain about; and they will get a (smaller) reward for doing so. The ones who are good at explaining but suck at research... will probably be fired. There are a few things that a person whose only skill is explaining could do in academia. They wouldn't get a reward for explaining someone else's paper clearly, but they could get a reward for writing a meta-review that would explain multiple papers clearly. In theory, their scientific contribution would be in comparing the papers, but in practice, hopefully even people who only needed one of the papers would cite them as a reward for making it easier to understand. -- I don't know if this would actually be sufficient to survive academically. People who are good at explaining can also make money by writing popular textbooks. Question is, whether there is a sufficient demand for a popular textbook explaining some obscure math.
- gallegojaime 6y ago
  Explainers-first shouldn't be fired if they make up a small percentage, because they do a wonderful job without the bulk of resources. I'm not sure if explainers-first are the minority, though. After all, it's much easier to review than to create. And we do want new research.
  - StandardFuture 6y ago
    Firstly, let's not fall for a false dichotomy. There is likely a simple equilibrium of review and creativity that must be maintained for an optimally healthy scientific community. Obviously, the old style of numerous-journals + publish-or-perish mentality was unhealthy implementations of a scientific system. But, I would move away from papers entirely. They hold no redeeming values over alternatives like a git repository published publicly with an "issues" forum e.g., GitHub, etc. This needs to absolutely become the new standard, and we need to get rid of papers and journals, both physically and digitally, in their entirety. They have zero redeeming factors at this point in time except to boost the ego of the published. Quality control can easily be decentralized and available to everyone using something like GitHub. We know this because that is literally what the security and trust of open-source software is predicated on: putting everything in the open.

tasogare 6y ago

Same for the Chinese characters. The complexity (number of characters and their different readings and meanings) stems from all the historical cruft the system accumulated for millennia, not something purposefully engineered to being obscure. There was lot of work made to keep the thing usable. The other thing is at the time yes, people who could read and write was a small minority. That have been the case in other societies with writing too. Not because of a cabal making it difficult but because getting an education was very costly.