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As a grad student, one of my more cynical professors said that to write a paper, you take a simple idea and then obfuscate it until it sounds complicated, and t

• inopinatus 3y ago
  If the whole academic career doesn't work out, patent drafting offers an even more baroque application of obfuscated writing skills.
  • seanhunter 3y ago
    Now the whole journey of Einstein from patent examiner to physics superstar makes sense to me.
    • bl0rg 3y ago
      He simply did not have the intellectual aptitude required for the patent business. Suddenly I don't feel so bad about becoming a math professor after failing accounting school.
      • deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
    • tough 3y ago
      He saw so many bad ideas on his patent job that he had some good ones of his own
      • JamesLeonis 3y ago
        Now I am imagining Einstein inventing general relativity as a shorthand to deny yet another perpetual motion machine patent.
• WinLychee 3y ago
  I have often found that to be true. From what I've heard, it is sometimes against the author's wishes, that they have to toss in equations to "make it look good" to get past review. At least in CS, you can read the source code if it's been published, and often it's a basic technique with a slight new twist that _maybe_ works but is super hard to reproduce. Also much of the papers are fluff lol, just random equations thrown in that are just copied from the textbook.
• _nalply 3y ago
  The incentives are misaligned. The general public wants something simple and useful. The writers want recognition. I learnt that when I wrote my own thesis. I tried to be simple and useful but I discovered something else when thinking about the subject: I wanted to make sure that my thesis gets good grades.
  • tgv 3y ago
    Two days ago, a friend of mine sent a link to a site with audio versions of scientific articles. He sarcastically added: "as if anyone actually still reads articles." In many discplines, articles are write only. It's publish-or-perish, not read-or-perish.
    • kingkongjaffa 3y ago
      That’s nuts to me. I read aerodynamics for my masters and would have been lost without skimming 100’s of papers and fully reading about 100 papers. Now I’m currently doing research on a niche statistics topic and I would be lost without papers. How does one figure out “this is what we currently understand about x” without research papers and plundering scihub?
      • refulgentis 3y ago
        They're exaggerating to express personal feelings re: bitterness about lack of engagement
      • tgv 3y ago
        Not every discipline has a constructive literature. I worked in psycho-linguistics. There's almost no article that provides anything you can build on. Almost all of it is description of experiment and outcome, with some theoretical interpretation, but that is almost always specific to interpretation within a specific theory. But those theories are high-level fantasy about language processing, which makes the interpretation meaningless elsewhere, even if the article did get everything else right (and that's rare too). So there are very few results you can expand upon. Lexical priming turned out to be reproducible and usable as a tool, the Stroop effect too. But those are exceptions. However, they don't explain the underlying mechanism. E.g., the Stroop effect is 90 years old, and there's no explanation of how it works. So if you read text books that explain you the state of the art of around 1980, you're practically up to date as far as real knowledge is concerned. The rest is infighting and publishing for its own sake. And psycho-linguistics at least has some experimental standards, because it is a fairly limited topic and it is suited to lab settings. Other fields don't even have that. Social psychology is a joke. Articles are based on questionnaires and introspection. That's why articles in those fields are not well read. They get read by a small audience, mostly people in the same school of thought, and mostly to add to the citation section. But not for knowledge.