There was this sociologist who had written a paper for us all to read ahead of time. I started to read the damn thing, and my eyes were coming out: I couldn’t make head nor tail of it! I figured it was because I hadn’t read any of the books on the list. I had this uneasy feeling of “I’m not adequate,” until finally I said to myself “I’m gonna stop, and read one sentence slowly so I can figure out what the hell it means.”
So I stopped-at random-and read the next sentence very carefully. I can’t remember it precisely, but it was very close to this: “The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels.” I went back and forth over it, and translated. You know what it means? “People read.”
Then I went over the next sentence, and realised that I could translate that one also. Then it became a kind of empty business: “Sometimes people read; sometimes people listen to the radio,” and so on, but written in such a fancy way that I couldn’t understand it at first, and when I finally deciphered it, there was nothing to it.
-- Feynman
I disagree. After going through quite a few research papers in my time, I've found the best are the ones that are direct and to the point. Many papers I've spent many hours/days trying to unravel just to realize the concepts were straightforward, not very novel, and there wasn't much of real substance to the paper.
Meanwhile, some of the most impactful papers I've read are direct and to the point. Kadmellia, Bitcoin, BitTorrent, DynamoDB, Firecracker, etc.
It seems like, when you have something of substance to say, you say it. When you don't you overcompensate by falling back on building an intricate puzzle of jargon and convoluted equations in an attempt to make what you're saying sound far more important than it really is.
As LLMs get better, I look forward to the day where every journal has a standard LLM filter you're required to apply to your paper that unravels all of this nonsense and rewrites it a more straightforward way, if not to directly publish than just for the editors to verify there isn't a simpler way to convey your ideas. I suspect that if we had an EIL5 filter for most journal articles, we'd discover that a majority of the words that get published have very little substance at all.
Systems research papers do not represent all research papers out there, not even in computer science.
In cryptography, certainly a paper with formal definitions and proofs can be much more valuable than a corresponding blog post. It's a field where formalism is desired, if not necessary. Otherwise you can't check other people's "proofs", or even know what model you're working in.
I think, since people haven't come up with better formalisms, sometimes it's quite obtuse, which gets mistaken as "academic writing", when really it's a best effort to formalize.
Requiring formalism does not preclude attaching an informal but intuitional description of the formal definition or proof. Unless the authors don't understand very clearly what they are talking about, or they want to prevent others from understanding their concepts too easily, I don't see why there is a reason for the authors not to attach an EIL5 in addition to formalism.
Sure. But it's an ELI5 "in addition to formalism", not "in lieu of formalism". In theory conferences like STOC or FOCS, the first section of the paper often comprises such an overview.
Certainly some papers are better written than others. But sometimes a blog post cannot replace a paper, unless it also goes into the depth and detail that formalism requires. (Then it becomes a 30 page blog post, where most people don't read past the intro.)
Papers are mostly read by other researchers, where the added background is actively bad because it obscures the real meat of the paper to the main audience.
If you just wanted a digestible intro then you would usually buy a textbook.
I think the argument that every research paper ought to be a mashup of a textbook + the actual research to be a bit silly from a “people should specialize at what they’re good at” standpoint.
Put in another context, I also don’t want every recipe to reintroduce what it means to “fry” or “braise” or “marinate”. We have Google for that.
I've long wanted an informational slider to bits of text. Something where you can zoom in and out to the level of desired complexity. LLM's might be able to fill in some of those gaps. You could turn any paper into a introduction of the subject it's a part of.
This sounds like a good use case for local llm models. Browser plugin, precooked prompts for different levels of detail, maybe a lora to give the model some idea of expected output. I bet some of the 13b models could do a useful job on this even if they were imperfect.
I don't know that much about AI, but my experience in other areas has shown me that 'more grown up' literature that feels harder to parse when your starting out later becomes the precise technical information you need as you get deeper into a subject. Like W3Schools when you start out in web dev vs MDN when you're skills are more mature.
I believe Feynman understood that he was oversimplifying, and I believe he was able to do because his reason for reading the paper was not the same as the reason another sociologist might have. Thus a sentence like, "The individual member of the social community often receives his information via visual, symbolic channels", does, to a non-expert, mean "people read", but to another sociologist of a researcher in related fields, phrases like "individual member", "social community", and "visual, symbolic channels" would terms of art. That means an expert in the field could read "social community" and it would mean, cognitively, an entire set of concepts in the field.
In short, jargon matters. People here can talk about functional, procedural, and object-oriented programming because each of the three words has more than just the dictionary meaning - to those of use in the field. In the same way we can talk about linear algebra and know it doesn't mean "algebra on lines".
Yes, it's possible to write scientifically without jargon and wordiness, but it's a lot of effort and takes much more space to say "a group who follow a social structure within a society (culture, norms, values, status). They may work together to organise social life within a particular place, or they may be bound by a sense of belonging sustained across time and space"[1]
Visual symbols could be anything from written words to police uniforms. It's not oversimplifying— it's flat-out wrong. It would be like reading
Expressions representing numbers may be combined with an expression representing a primitive procedure (such as + or *) to form a compound expression that represents the application of the procedure to those numbers.
And an English professor haughtily responding, "you know what that means? 'Computers compute!' This SICP book is just a pile of jargon that could be dramatically simplified!"
His dismissal revealed nothing about the topic, but a whole lot about how so many in the "hard" sciences view others. Don't understand the text? It's the text's fault! For I am a real scientist, and if I don't understand it, it's not understandable!
He might have been a genius, but he should have stuck to subatomic particles and left exploring human behavior up to the people who'd done the prerequisite reading.
Well, maybe, but you can rationalize arbitrary amounts of pointless jargon that way.
Besides, in the example Faynman gives the simple sentence is actually shorter. Maybe that shorter sentence loses some information that the jargon carried, but Occam's razor suggests the writer was just trying to sound smarter.
Some bad writing certainly comes from trying to sound “academic” or “scholarly” but there’s more to it than that.
A lot of research involves lumping and splitting: what underlying properties do these seemingly-different share (or vice versa). For example, reading text is just one possible instantiation of a “visual symbolic channel.” Traffic lights, road signs, gauges and dials, logos, and clocks also carry information the same way. If you want to discuss “reading and reading-like activities”, you may want some kind of umbrella term.
Plus, you may want to contrast them with other ways of sharing information: non-symbolic systems that literally depict the item in question (photos on a picture menu, for example) or using a different sense altogether, like church bells for telling time.
Not an academic here, but I've read (and continue to read) through research papers regularly.
The original bitcoin paper is a great example. I was able to follow the paper almost fully at my first read itself—despite my not having a formal background in maths.
...and as you said, many of the insubstantial papers hide behind jargon and unnecessarily complex equations, just to camouflage their lack of substance. It's frustrating to spend time deciphering a paper, only to realize that you've essentially wasted that time.
The criticism was """Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague"[39] and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way""""
>Haraway's work has been criticized for being "methodologically vague"[39] and using noticeably opaque language that is "sometimes concealing in an apparently deliberate way
So you're saying that "Her work is basically handwaving and bullshitting".
Yes, but also, wrapping the handwaving and bullshitting in a layer of obfuscation:
"Michel Foucault’s biopolitics is a faccid premonition of cyborg politics, a very open feld.
By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we
are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine
and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it
gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both
imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist,
male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from
the refections of the other—the relation between organism
and machine has been a border war"
Donna Haraway was born 6 years after “stay woke” in its sense as an admonition to maintain alertness to the racist context was coined. Leaving aside a debate over whether her work is a good match for “woke”, she very much cannot have been woke before woke was a thing. (Before its recent replacement of “politically correct” as the American Right’s preferred, meaning-stripped, label for everything it disagrees with, sure, but “woke” was a thing long before that.)
>Leaving aside a debate over whether her work is a good match for “woke”, she very much cannot have been woke before woke was a thing
A game of being pedantic is always welcome:
She very well could have been "woke before woke was a thing", because "woke" as the parent means it in her case, refers to the modern usage (of like, 2 decades), not the original term of the 40s that might have preceeded her birth.
So take the parent's comment to mean:
"She was woke, in the modern, circa-2000s+ sense, before woke, in the modern circa-2000s+ sense was a thing, not in the 1950s namesake sense".
Similar to how somebody could have been a hipster (in the 2000s+ sense [1]) before a hipster was a thing (before 2000s), even if they have been born in the 70s. Sure, the term already existed before the 70s, but it referred to a different thing.
The 1938 sense in which it was coin3d is exactly the sense of the 1950s and the sense that got ibcreased attention circa 2000s and catapulted to attention alongside BLM (which itself was a response to the same kind of even that the art in which the phrase was coined for responded to).
The only newer sense is the American Right’s use of the term to replace “political correctness” as an empty epithet for everything and everyone it disagrees with.
Language grows organically, and the American right gets as much as the American left to define what a word means or how proponents of a movement or social fad are seen in practice (besides woke's standard definition is just "awake", if someone insists on the "original meaning")
So, one side could see woke in theory as a noble activist/social consciousness practice, which can not go wrong and helps liberate us all.
The other side might see woke in practice as intolerable virtue signalling and self-aggrandizing whose actions often border on farcical.
Thanks; that's exactly what I meant. I leave these things out because I assume not everybody is pedantically waiting to call me out on a slight variation on their personal belief system.
> I disagree. After going through quite a few research papers in my time, I've found the best are the ones that are direct and to the point. Many papers I've spent many hours/days trying to unravel just to realize the concepts were straightforward, not very novel, and there wasn't much of real substance to the paper.
Can say the same thing about code. Some people just honestly don't want to give away how simple the core logic is seemingly, and will lead you through myriad twists and turns to finally see the point.
Meanwhile, some of the most impactful papers I've read are direct and to the point. Kadmellia, Bitcoin, BitTorrent, DynamoDB, Firecracker, etc.
It seems like, when you have something of substance to say, you say it. When you don't you overcompensate by falling back on building an intricate puzzle of jargon and convoluted equations in an attempt to make what you're saying sound far more important than it really is.
As LLMs get better, I look forward to the day where every journal has a standard LLM filter you're required to apply to your paper that unravels all of this nonsense and rewrites it a more straightforward way, if not to directly publish than just for the editors to verify there isn't a simpler way to convey your ideas. I suspect that if we had an EIL5 filter for most journal articles, we'd discover that a majority of the words that get published have very little substance at all.