Comment by danbruc
1 year ago
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.