3 ms·

> Are academics intending to write to an academic audience? And if so, why? is this a serious question?

insanitybit 3y ago
Yes, I wonder why researchers in a domain wouldn't write their research papers with the direct goal of the practitioners of that domain being the audience. Obviously I assume academics would also be a part of that audience, but not exclusively so.
- mathisfun123 3y ago
  this is a theory paper, the "practioners" of this domain are other theorists/mathematicians. the paper exactly speaks to that audience. lemme ask you something: do the projects on your github have complexity bounds on the functions? i'm betting no. and if i came to you as a mathematician and asked you why your work doesn't speak to me and my community (as a potential audience) you would say to me what?
  - insanitybit 3y ago
    > this is a theory paper, the "practioners" of this domain are other theorists/mathematicians. the paper exactly speaks to that audience. I'll go one further - I think this paper is surprisingly approachable for its content. But I'm not talking about one paper - this one happened to put some terms in its abstract without a glossary but it does later define them in a more helpful way. That's pretty rare to the point where I almost never expect it. > lemme ask you something: do the projects on your github have complexity bounds on the functions? I just explained that programmers don't write code for the audience of researchers. Further, programmers who publish to Github are generally not publishing for any audience but instead for resilience purposes. Otherwise, yes, programmers comment their documents in English all the time. Not the complexity because... > why your work doesn't speak to me and my community (as a potential audience) you would say to me what? That I've never ever had a mathematician reach out to me about my code because that almost never actually happens? Whereas programmers read research papers, or want to, all the time. Hence the paper showing up on a forum that is primarily populated by software engineers.

Yes, I wonder why researchers in a domain wouldn't write their research papers with the direct goal of the practitioners of that domain being the audience. Obviously I assume academics would also be a part of that audience, but not exclusively so.

mathisfun123 3y ago
this is a theory paper, the "practioners" of this domain are other theorists/mathematicians. the paper exactly speaks to that audience. lemme ask you something: do the projects on your github have complexity bounds on the functions? i'm betting no. and if i came to you as a mathematician and asked you why your work doesn't speak to me and my community (as a potential audience) you would say to me what?
- insanitybit 3y ago
  > this is a theory paper, the "practioners" of this domain are other theorists/mathematicians. the paper exactly speaks to that audience. I'll go one further - I think this paper is surprisingly approachable for its content. But I'm not talking about one paper - this one happened to put some terms in its abstract without a glossary but it does later define them in a more helpful way. That's pretty rare to the point where I almost never expect it. > lemme ask you something: do the projects on your github have complexity bounds on the functions? I just explained that programmers don't write code for the audience of researchers. Further, programmers who publish to Github are generally not publishing for any audience but instead for resilience purposes. Otherwise, yes, programmers comment their documents in English all the time. Not the complexity because... > why your work doesn't speak to me and my community (as a potential audience) you would say to me what? That I've never ever had a mathematician reach out to me about my code because that almost never actually happens? Whereas programmers read research papers, or want to, all the time. Hence the paper showing up on a forum that is primarily populated by software engineers.