quick rant
i’m so tired of over the top “intellectual” vocabulary in academia. a lot of concepts could be explained with simple words and would get the point across just as well, or better, and additionally make the conversation more accessible to those outside of a specific field. Why do you need to use big smart words to explain simple things? Is it because it tickles your ego when people need 10 minutes to comprehend one sentence? argh
I always thought it had to do with avoiding ambiguity. By using a specific word with a specific meaning, you don’t need to expand on the context. I think I read that somewhere a long time ago and just accepted it.
It is pretty much this, same reason lawyers use “legalese” in contracts. That word has an accepted meaning, when used the meaning is clear to others in the field. You don’t need an extra document to define each term as it is expected that others in the field will understand the language used.
In saying that, sometimes it is just complication for the sake of complication.
There is a saying, usually attributed to Einstein but could also be William of Ockham:
Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.
People often focus on the first part while ignoring the more important second part. When something is made too simple, you lose the nuance and fine detail that makes it a useful concept. Not everything can be ELI5’d, somethings are just really complicated.
I struggle with this at work a lot. My manager often tries to push me for a simpler explanation, but unfortunately I can only simplify things so much before they start being wrong in a lot of situations
I’m academia? How about Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that should be written (at least at synopsis level) clearly and for the casual reader. However, anything mathematics related and… Fuck you, you don’t know how to calculate an integral? Git gud, scrub.
In high school, I used to be frustrated by this as well. But now, I’ve come to appreciate being able to get a reminder for a definition or a famous result just by googling and clicking on the resulting wikipedia page. Way better than having to find and dig through a badly-scanned pdf of a paper from the 70s which presented the definition that everyone in the field now uses.
I’ve nothing against the page having more technical farther down the page… I’ve done that with some computing articles that I’m qualified to talk about - simplify the description for the layman, put the technical description underneath…
Math nerds just don’t.
I despise this, too. I work in a pretty technical field and actively throw bricks at people who write like this.
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.
Who?
warning: it is very fringe.
Jacques Vallee. He had a Ted talk (or Ted ex or whatever) and it was equally unimpressive.
Note that he’s French. The French have a particularly bad case of this (e.g. continental philosophy).
Is it really science, if it doesn’t sound like something Neil deGrasse Tyson would say to himself for 30 minutes straight in front of his bathroom mirror?
While he tries to kiss himself somewhere other than his lips?
That same problem can be seen in law and it’s a lot more relevant to the average citizen than academic papers, since “know your rights” means jack shit if you have no fucking clue what the words mean.
It’s snobbish gatekeeping to feel superior to the filthy plebs
goodness, don’t even get me started on law. I had a hard time reading my tenancy agreement, and I know I’m not a stupid person. I’m not saying this to brag, but how is someone, let’s say less intellectually inclined, supposed to deal with that? Sign whatever paper they get told allows them to have shelter and hope they didn’t just sell their firstborn to the landlord?
What kills me a little is when someone has to come up with some nebulous acronym that we’re all supposed to know but no one ever defines it at the beginning of the document. In EEG we like to change the name of what are now known as lateralized periodic discharges. I have a document with about 25 different terms that all describe different terminology that’s been used to describe that EEG finding.
Meanwhile I’m in here thinking, I wonder what EEG means?
See how desensitized I am to that, electroencephalography. Electro- electronic, encephalo- head, graph- record, electronic head record, those wavy lines from the brain.
Reasonably obligatory xkcd?
I’m currently writing a small literature review on tgf-b and SMAD signalling in cancer for uni rn
And I’m really confused why this one paper’s talking about how miR-520h induces the tgf-b/smad7 pathway but also binds to and suppresses smad7
Like why on earth is it activating the tgf-b/smad7 pathway, a pathway that stops stuff like the epithelial mesenchynal transition, if it’s just going to bind to smad7 anyway???
Worst thing is, I can’t find any other papers on why this actually happens
I swear I’m just dumb at times ;-;
My life got so much better when I started assuming the former.
I feel like that’s good advice for reasonably intelligent people. But it’s kind of a slippery slope, especially for people that are dumb as shit. For example, my neighbor became a hard antivaxxer during COVID.
She mistrusted everything that was actually science, assuming that she since she didn’t understand what qualified professionals were saying, they must be wrong. But if someone could make a simple (even if incredibly wrong) argument on YouTube, she’d eat that shit up.
