Comment by latency-guy2
1 year ago
Papers are designed to be read by a specific audience of highly technical, skilled people in a topic where if it is original research, must be very explicit, and prove and disprove multiple things simultaneously.
Of course, standards vary significantly institution to institution and even person to person, and highly technical, skilled people are not indicative of full capability of reading, let alone reviewing the topic, doubly so when it is original research.
Let me translate this for the layman: papers are written using terms and notation that only makes sense if you've gone through the the process of learning their derivation from first principles in the narrow field in which they apply.
It has the odd effect of making this stuff comprehensible only to those that essentially already know what it is, and possibly a few people academically adjacent to those people.
Other people can decipher it, after long and arduous labor, but it essentially requires rediscovering the path that brought it about, knowing what the outcome will be. In that sense these papers are less useful than they seem.
Academia is a little like religion: to outsiders the language and rituals make little sense, only those indoctrinated in its tenets can achieve enlightenment.
This is a very poor and inaccurate "translation". Papers from math and physics are hard to understand not because of specific choice of "terms and notation" but because of actual concepts they are based on. Terms and notation actually make it easier to understand, compressing pages of words into a single symbol. Without these the best you get is quanta article, where you can get a vague feeling of what is being done, but no actual understanding.
If you talk about a modern city with a hunter gatherer, how many words would you have to explain? Do these words exist because modern life is "like a religion" and hunter gatherer is not "indoctrinated"?
I think this completely misses the point. A paper presents one new idea and builds on top of many existing ideas and generally assumes that the reader is familiar with all the existing ideas. And that is completely reasonable, the purpose of a paper is to concisely present the new idea, not to be a textbook that teaches you the entire field from the ground up.
That said, conveying an idea in an easily understandable way is hard and some authors will do better or worse than others. Also papers will usually not purely present the new idea but provide some context so that the reader only needs to be familiar with the topic up to the context but the amount of context given will vary a lot between papers.
I understand what papers are and I accept that they naturally end up being how they are.
Even if you study textbooks, which themselves suffer the same fate, requiring other textbooks or knowledge of terms and notation as prerequisites, and have knowledge in the field it doesn't mean you can understand most papers. Fields and subfields have their own (obscure) terminology and notation, often individual practitioners do. Even if they don't terminology and notation isn't used consistently, which becomes critical when you're trying to learn and understand.
I'm just lamenting how inscrutable this knowledge is and how sad and frustrating that is. Most of this stuff is not that complicated once you know what they're actually talking about. Instead you end up banging your head against the wall for hours trying to divine the intent of the author or go on endless yak shaving expeditions trying to nail down terms and concepts.