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>academic culture deliberately encourages creating documents that are extremely difficult for people to learn from. That's because they are not meant to be use

>academic culture deliberately encourages creating documents that are extremely difficult for people to learn from. That's because they are not meant to be used as a learning resource. They're meant to communicate results to other experts who will understand them much faster than you ever could. If you want to learn a new field, start with textbooks and then look for review papers or things like that. Understanding research papers may be your ultimate goal, but don't expect to get there just by consuming these types of papers.

gopher_space 2y ago
> They're meant to communicate results to other experts who will understand them much faster than you ever could. And yet I'm still deconstructing papers entirely within my domain down to the bullet-pointed outline the author used to write it from. We do not need to write like Dickensian wordsmiths and we are not good at it. I'd consider it gatekeeping if I thought people wrote this way out of malice rather than cupidity.
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  Meh, I consider myself pretty deep in my domains of expertise and even I regularly struggle because I haven't had that much exposition to a specific subject that is not exactly my specialty. You really can't rate these things unless you are literally among the top experts at the forefront of the topic. That's also who I'd have in mind when writing such a paper. Not some well versed enthusiast, not even a PhD student. Depending on your field, you might be able to count the people who can comfortably read and understand your paper on one hand. For everyone else, the effort will rise exponentially for every step they are removed from that specific topic.
  - gopher_space 2y ago
    I'm thinking more about a situation where the author has three bullet points to convey and needs to construct an encapsulating paragraph around them. When I'm parsing the paper I'll need to undo that work.
    - sigmoid10 2y ago
      That's just what prose is. But admittedly some people are better at reading/writing it than others.

gopher_space 2y ago

> They're meant to communicate results to other experts who will understand them much faster than you ever could. And yet I'm still deconstructing papers entirely within my domain down to the bullet-pointed outline the author used to write it from. We do not need to write like Dickensian wordsmiths and we are not good at it. I'd consider it gatekeeping if I thought people wrote this way out of malice rather than cupidity.

sigmoid10 2y ago
Meh, I consider myself pretty deep in my domains of expertise and even I regularly struggle because I haven't had that much exposition to a specific subject that is not exactly my specialty. You really can't rate these things unless you are literally among the top experts at the forefront of the topic. That's also who I'd have in mind when writing such a paper. Not some well versed enthusiast, not even a PhD student. Depending on your field, you might be able to count the people who can comfortably read and understand your paper on one hand. For everyone else, the effort will rise exponentially for every step they are removed from that specific topic.
- gopher_space 2y ago
  I'm thinking more about a situation where the author has three bullet points to convey and needs to construct an encapsulating paragraph around them. When I'm parsing the paper I'll need to undo that work.
  - sigmoid10 2y ago
    That's just what prose is. But admittedly some people are better at reading/writing it than others.