I despise this, too. I work in a pretty technical field and actively throw bricks at people who write like this.

100%. This is actually the entire reason I dropped out of my masters program.

I’m a science communicator. My whole purpose for existing is making science accessible to people with less formal science training than a high school student.

I was going for a masters in conservation biology, because what better to communicate these days, right? And in the limnology class I took the first semester, all my papers got poor marks for failing to use the unnecessary academic terminology. It was all entirely correct information, just simplified, and that was unacceptable.

And I can’t work under those terms. I just am entirely incapable of making things overly complicated for no reason. It’s a force for specificity sometimes, but usually what it actually does is limit the reach of the work. And that’s just stupid.

Me as an intern in a lab, being asked among others to review a draft

Hey, can you explain to me equation 3.1? I am not sure what N and Q refers to?

Oh that one I just copied from another paper, it is not really important to the argument.

There’s a popular figure in a fringe topic who’s contributed to computer science enough to have earned respect (and rightfully so) who writes these fringe articles with so much fanfare and pretentiousness that the entire meaning is impossible to extract.

It just ends up sounding like a pretentious word salad.

For sure, you occasionally run into some obscurantism, and that’s problematic. In my field, bad writing is usually just from people not writing in their native language.

But look, you have to acknowledge, some stuff is just hard. There is often just an unavoidable barrier to entry. I think behind a lot of this sentiment is the assumption that academics are just twiddling their thumbs for 10 years through undergrad and grad school, and anyone should be able to walk into the kind of conversations they’re having after all that. I mean, most of the time, not really. We go a learn a bunch of stuff and our colleagues learn similar things, and we then assume a common framework and some common knowledge, both of which are generally not widely available to the general public.

Where I got my PhD, we all had to write a lay summary of the thesis. It’s good they made us do it, but we always used to laugh about it. There’s usually too much assumed background for a useful lay summary to even be possible. You just end up with a very vague facsimile of a summary of the type of thing you’re doing.

It might depend on the field. I have no doubt that the average paper in my field is unavoidably going to be pretty inscrutable to laypeople, and that’s mostly fine. Maybe in some other fields it’s more avoidable, somehow, but again I’d have to imagine that if people are spending their time productively in the academic system they’ll have picked up a bunch of background mostly unavailable to most people.

As a PS, there’s also something weird to me in general about people thinking that they know how to do other peoples’ jobs better than them. See it all the time with retail, planning, media etc, people can’t seem to fathom that things may be the way they are for good reasons that they aren’t privy to.

The only field where it’s actually justified: math. In math, every time has an exact definition behind it, and you have to use the exact term.

To reach the necessary amount of pages so I can graduate.

Inferior writers, inferior minds.

Unfortunately there’s a bit of pressure to osbficate the core idea of a publication in academia. While the ideal academics try to hold themselves to is to freely exchange information, for researchers who are paid to study very neiche topics there’s an insensitive to put some resistance into others entering their field. There is only so much funding and one more team means more competition. So some researchers who find themselves in that position will intentionally complicate their published work as a way to create a disincentive to others from crowding their field. It sucks but the reality is that funding and money come before the faithful pursuit of knowledge.

Also, some people just suck at writing.

Yep.

When I was in high school, I was upset that I didn’t know enough.

When I was in my 30s, I worked hard to fully understand everything.

Now I’m in my 40s and I just assume I’m stupid. I got nothing to prove. If I’m convincing a group that’s paying me to explain some tech architecture, sure. But a group of bros who want me to weigh in on why the sky is green, bruh IDGAF sure the sky is green.

Ah, yes. Of course. I understand your frustration entirely because of my deep understanding of the specific situation.

Would a list of tools and search engines be helpful?

Yeah, a little of column A, a little from column B.