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All of us in computing and natural sciences love to say this about the social sciences, but wouldn’t an outsider to our fields say the same after reading a pape
by bryananderson 5y ago
All of us in computing and natural sciences love to say this about the social sciences, but wouldn’t an outsider to our fields say the same after reading a paper? I don’t think it’s fair to expect academic work to use layperson’s terms. We wouldn’t expect, say, biologists to do this when writing for other biologists—we’d expect a biologist-communicator like Richard Dawkins to write a book summarizing the original work in a way that a smart layperson can understand without needing to learn the field’s jargon. Similarly there are great books by historian-communicators for a general audience, but that’s not the way they talk when writing for other academic historians.
- seoaeu 5y agoYeah, skimming the start of the Spanner paper (to take a random example from CS), can you really claim with a straight face that any of these would be intelligible to the average layperson? > At the highest level of abstraction, it is a database that shards data across many sets of Paxos state machines in data centers spread all over the world. Replication is used for global availability and geographic locality; clients automatically failover between replicas. > provides externally consistent reads and writes, and globally-consistent reads across the database at a timestamp. > Spanner assigns globally-meaningful commit timestamps to transactions, even though transactions may be distributed. The timestamps reflect serialization order.