Comment by Twisol

> Do you really need to express concepts with a single strange character? What does it buy you, given that the downsides for readability are quite obvious?

As someone who dabbles in the field, I'll bite. I find that more succinct expressions make their structure more apparent than less succinct expressions. This is critical for identifying (and then demonstrating) the general principles underlying any particular example, which is a great deal of what we do in theoretical research. (It's usually better to describe a whole family of solutions than to describe a single solution; and failing that, to indicate some directions potentially leading to general principles.)

What do I mean by structure? This is a bit of a dodge, but structure is what you get when you remove all the data, all the aspects that pin an expression to a specific scenario instead of a general pattern. If you can recognize and memorize the pattern, you can apply it to a much broader class of examples than the one you learned it from. Concise notation is one tool for downplaying the concrete data and calling out the common aspects more deliberately.

As other posters have said, this can be abused. I'd even say it's a very rare paper that uses concise notation appropriately to its fullest extent as an aid to the reader. But the concision does serve an important purpose to experts in the field (who need rather less aid): it makes the newly contributed patterns more visible (and uses existing patterns to effectively de-emphasize parts).

> but if you just want to read and understand concepts and learn facts...

Most research papers do not have as a goal for a technical reader to understand concepts and learn facts. (There are certainly visible exceptions, see just about anything written by Simon Peyton Jones.) Research papers are evidence of progress at the forefront of human knowledge; they're shared amongst an expert community to help drive that whole community forward.

We absolutely need more effort to distill research and collect it into a more cohesive picture. Unfortunately, that responsibility does not (and probably cannot, in the current system) fall on the original researchers themselves. There are a few organized efforts out there for some fields; the one I know of is Distill.pub, for machine learning: https://distill.pub/about/

>> When we rush papers out the door to meet conference deadlines, something suffers — often it is the readability and clarity of our communication. This can add severe drag to the entire community as our readers struggle to understand our ideas. We think this "research debt" can be avoided.

But I don't think the concision of notation is at fault. It's just the most obvious roadblock to a (relatively) lay reader. The truth is simply that the paper wasn't written with you in mind.