I like'd PG's tweet about this: "Possible explanation: papers are becoming less how you communicate ideas, and more how you register work to get credit for it."
The old problem "when you turn a metric into a goal, it ceases to be a good metric". Scientists are rewarded for churning out a large number of fragmentary (if you have a really good idea, it's good for more than one paper), shoddily written papers to collect citation points. "The stuff between the formulas" is not something authors really care about.
I noticed the awful writing in new (physics) papers when I was still in university and had to read a paper occasionally. I was always relieved to find a paper from before roughly 1980. They are so much better written.
Older papers are often better written than most textbooks while recent papers are much, much worse. It is not just due to the subject matter changing.
Reportedly, journals also used to have paid copy editors. Today - well, you have heard about Elsevier and other publishers, right? They don't only seem to increase prices to increase their profits.
Writing ability is on the wane in general. In professional settings, IMO this is mostly due to the disappearance of secretaries and clerical staff, lousy education and more non-native speakers.
A long time ago as an intern, I had to re-typeset and format some reports published by a .gov since the 1910s for reprint and web publishing. You would see variations in style, but the reports started getting worse in the early 80s, and are almost incomprehensible today.
This seems inherently linked to the increase in complexity and precision of scientific ideas, particularly over the time scale investigated (back to 1881).
I certainly applaud efforts to manage this complexity (e.g. the article mentions possibly adding "lay person summaries" in addition to abstracts), but I think that increased complexity and depth of scientific results is the intended outcome.
It seems analogous to these insane computer-generated proofs in mathematics -- maybe we need new tooling and approaches to make sense of them, but the fact that they exist is proof that we're discovering things and moving forward.
I don't buy that explanation - there's also just a lot of bad writing out there today. And, I'd wager, you'll find (more frequently than before) attempts to impress (and even obfuscate), rather then communicate and elucidate.
Note also that your hypothesis was briefly addressed in the article:
> An alternative explanation for the main finding is that the cumulative growth of scientific knowledge makes an increasingly complex language necessary. This cannot be directly tested, but if this were to fully explain the trend, we would expect a greater diversity of vocabulary as science grows more specialized. While accounting for the original finding of the increase in difficult words and of syllable count, this would not explain the increase of general scientific jargon words (e.g. 'furthermore' or 'novel', Figure 6B). Thus, this possible explanation cannot fully account for our findings.
Is "furthermore" scientific jargon? I thought it is just a professional version of "moreover". Like, I would say "moreover" to a friend, but write "furthermore" in a letter.
I had no idea that 'furthermore' or 'novel' are scientific jargon. I have seen that frequently enough to think it is normal English word. I would use furthermore in paper, because that was the word people seemed to be using all the time.
Eh. I'll definitely say that at least one of my favorite authors (as in, scientists) to read is being deliberately obscurantist about how he writes his papers. Or at the very least, he's using all his own vocabulary and terminology in each paper to push his favorite philosophical interpretation of his own work. This makes him extraordinarily difficult for other people in his field to understand, which actually means people don't engage with his ideas when they rightly should.
But he certainly gets to publish a lot with his own favorite colleagues and push his philosophy!
> This seems inherently linked to the increase in complexity and precision of scientific ideas, particularly over the time scale investigated (back to 1881).
I think that's a reasonable conclusion here. I mean medicine in that time frame seems to have gone from "Yeah just shelve some cocaine and your cough will go away" to MRI's so it makes sense that the research and results have gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.
I suspect that today scientific texts are more frequently written by non-native English speakers and that technical jargon can be more precisely defined and understood in terms of non-English languages. It is also worth noting that scientific terms of 100 years ago are often more main stream, e.g. quantum mechanics, relativity, uncertainty, etc.
I'm pretty sure this is not the case. Scientific texts are usually awfully bad in any language I speak, including 2 languages that are my native. In fact, "scientific paper style" language is so distinct, that it can be easily applied to a paper that is not "scientific" per se, essentially obfuscating it.
It seems to be very unpopular opinion here on HN, but it seems clear to me, that academia has become some kind of patalogical structure, which exists to exists — essentially an organism. It feeds on government and student's money, as long as it can seems credible and necessary to the outside world; and people within this structure can live as long, as they show that they are not "slacking" somehow — publishing papers, giving lectures — but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result. Form has become more important than the essence.
So, here we have it: the form of a "scientific paper".
The casual nature with which you dismiss thousands of people who have devoted their lives to the pursuit of academic knowledge is frustrating and incredibly childish.
Like seriously? Do you think all of us PhDs just sit around and laugh about how dumb the government is while planning how we can make more useless papers? Do you think grad students just train to become better bullshitters? Like what kind of hole do you live in where any of that even appears close to reality.
Seems to me you just tried reading a couple papers, got confused, and decided to justify your own intelligence by claiming their hard work and advancements in the field were pointless.
> but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result
Stop talking out of your rear end. I want to produce a result. My advisor wants to produce a result. We all want to have meaning in our lives.
EDIT: As just a casual example of the importance of academia, look at the Deep Learning boom. First researched around 1960, only now becoming practical and useful. It's almost as if the things academics study need time and a lot of work to actually come to fruition. Research level study is highly expensive for very little real gains. This has always been the case. It takes a long-long time for the investments into research to make sense, but when they do, the advancements are completely game-changing.
The facts are the opposite really. Today we are collecting so much data that we don't have enough time to actually write it all up. That is why we beyond busy.
Academia is absolutely necrotic. Between the fact that good scientists spend most of their time writing grants, the fact that most scientists spend their life as eternal postdocs, the rigged publishing game, the increasing balkanization of fields, the fact that most people are trying to protect the status quo rather than overturn it, and the goal of publishing rather than actually discovering, things look very grim.
I think that government needs to cut back on grants, and instead provide better incentives for corporations to do open access basic research. This would still have the problem of producing somewhat obfuscated science, but in general it would push things towards being more interdisciplinary and functional, since corporations could increase profitability by leveraging synergies between basic and applied research.
I think the reason that people prioritize the form is because of a kind of cargo cult. The form is followed because that's how it's always been and it has worked so far. And people are scared that if the form is changed it will have unexpected consequences.
Once upon a time a top scientists could contribute to biology, chemistry, and physics, yet today this is extremely unlikely. All the knowledge we accumulate and build on need names, structures, and nuance. You can't just throw that all away and describe what you are doing or thinking limited to a basic highschool level vocabulary.
The problems we face are harder, for complex, and more esoteric than ever before, and it is amazing.
Albeit things like "managerial summary" (not ELI5 but quite close) are very much needed. Abstracts tend to not deliver this. More importantly, often key limitations are overlooked in both to make the research look way more groundbreaking than it really is.
Caveat lector: speaking mostly for computer science and medicine.
It is interesting to finally realize that a large part of the audience in this web site is really anti-science. News that in some way attack mainstream science are very much commented in a positive light, as if scientists were secretly trying to make their own work less available and obscure on purpose.
Or maybe some are defensive of bad science and can't stand to see news that attack bad practices in mainstream science to be lauded?
Being anti- the bad versions/practices of something is not the same as being anti- that something. (The same way a whistleblower cop is not anti-police).
There's this story Brecht wrote about a guy telling another: "I'm an enemy of newspapers. I want them closed down". To which the other guy replied, "I'm an even bigger enemy of newspapers. I want better newspapers".
>as if scientists were secretly trying to make their own work less available and obscure on purpose.
If that gives them an advantage (e.g. publishing lots of BS papers and advancing their careers) then they are (and we know they are, meta studies and experienced academics say and show so). There's nothing of the "Area 51/Illuminati" kind of conspiracy thinking about this, if that's what you imply.
Rather it is the classic self-advancement BS that goes on since the world started, where people exploit loopholes and cheat to get ahead. That includes scientists, especially in today's publish or perish climate.
This. I am against bad science and bad scientific writing. There is plenty of both (just follow @RealPeerReview on twitter if you need convincing, but be prepared to suffer).
That doesn't mean at all that I'm against science. In fact, the opposite is the case – I'm against bad science, pseudo-science, and bad science writing because I'm so ardently in favour of good science.
I don't think it is anti science, I think it is anti-academia (which is a sentiment I mostly agree with).
Of course, there is also a growing trend against scientific hubris (and against "experts" in general) because of highly visible expert failures in the fields of nutrition and economics, for example. I don't so much think this is anti-science in general (people still love the fruits of science, after all), but anti-arrogance.
It's not just readability that's a problem, it's also that relevant code, data, etc are scattered all over the internet.
Another problem is that many people struggle with english which is the defacto language for research. This introduces two problems: first, one must learn to speak english, then, one must learn how to trawl through academicese.
There have been various similar projects to wikipaper in the past, but one of the reasons that they fail is that not many researchers have the spare time to contribute to a project like this. I spoke to the guys running Google Scholar and they told me this is the biggest problem. I believe I have an innovative way to solve this problem however, anyone who wants more details please get in touch.
I believe that making it easier to understand research going on in neighboring fields will dramatically increase the rate at which research is performed.
Readit News
https://twitter.com/i/web/status/906075608181915649
I noticed the awful writing in new (physics) papers when I was still in university and had to read a paper occasionally. I was always relieved to find a paper from before roughly 1980. They are so much better written. Older papers are often better written than most textbooks while recent papers are much, much worse. It is not just due to the subject matter changing.
Reportedly, journals also used to have paid copy editors. Today - well, you have heard about Elsevier and other publishers, right? They don't only seem to increase prices to increase their profits.
A long time ago as an intern, I had to re-typeset and format some reports published by a .gov since the 1910s for reprint and web publishing. You would see variations in style, but the reports started getting worse in the early 80s, and are almost incomprehensible today.
One professor of mine spoke fondly of the "LPU", the least publishable unit...
> "when you turn a metric into a goal, it ceases to be a good metric"
Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law
PS: Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um?) esse delendum.
I certainly applaud efforts to manage this complexity (e.g. the article mentions possibly adding "lay person summaries" in addition to abstracts), but I think that increased complexity and depth of scientific results is the intended outcome.
It seems analogous to these insane computer-generated proofs in mathematics -- maybe we need new tooling and approaches to make sense of them, but the fact that they exist is proof that we're discovering things and moving forward.
Note also that your hypothesis was briefly addressed in the article:
> An alternative explanation for the main finding is that the cumulative growth of scientific knowledge makes an increasingly complex language necessary. This cannot be directly tested, but if this were to fully explain the trend, we would expect a greater diversity of vocabulary as science grows more specialized. While accounting for the original finding of the increase in difficult words and of syllable count, this would not explain the increase of general scientific jargon words (e.g. 'furthermore' or 'novel', Figure 6B). Thus, this possible explanation cannot fully account for our findings.
But he certainly gets to publish a lot with his own favorite colleagues and push his philosophy!
I think that's a reasonable conclusion here. I mean medicine in that time frame seems to have gone from "Yeah just shelve some cocaine and your cough will go away" to MRI's so it makes sense that the research and results have gotten a hell of a lot more complicated.
It seems to be very unpopular opinion here on HN, but it seems clear to me, that academia has become some kind of patalogical structure, which exists to exists — essentially an organism. It feeds on government and student's money, as long as it can seems credible and necessary to the outside world; and people within this structure can live as long, as they show that they are not "slacking" somehow — publishing papers, giving lectures — but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result. Form has become more important than the essence.
So, here we have it: the form of a "scientific paper".
Like seriously? Do you think all of us PhDs just sit around and laugh about how dumb the government is while planning how we can make more useless papers? Do you think grad students just train to become better bullshitters? Like what kind of hole do you live in where any of that even appears close to reality.
Seems to me you just tried reading a couple papers, got confused, and decided to justify your own intelligence by claiming their hard work and advancements in the field were pointless.
> but they don't actually need (nor often want) to produce any result
Stop talking out of your rear end. I want to produce a result. My advisor wants to produce a result. We all want to have meaning in our lives.
EDIT: As just a casual example of the importance of academia, look at the Deep Learning boom. First researched around 1960, only now becoming practical and useful. It's almost as if the things academics study need time and a lot of work to actually come to fruition. Research level study is highly expensive for very little real gains. This has always been the case. It takes a long-long time for the investments into research to make sense, but when they do, the advancements are completely game-changing.
And to your others assertions. Utter hogwash.
I think that government needs to cut back on grants, and instead provide better incentives for corporations to do open access basic research. This would still have the problem of producing somewhat obfuscated science, but in general it would push things towards being more interdisciplinary and functional, since corporations could increase profitability by leveraging synergies between basic and applied research.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
The problems we face are harder, for complex, and more esoteric than ever before, and it is amazing.
Caveat lector: speaking mostly for computer science and medicine.
Being anti- the bad versions/practices of something is not the same as being anti- that something. (The same way a whistleblower cop is not anti-police).
There's this story Brecht wrote about a guy telling another: "I'm an enemy of newspapers. I want them closed down". To which the other guy replied, "I'm an even bigger enemy of newspapers. I want better newspapers".
>as if scientists were secretly trying to make their own work less available and obscure on purpose.
If that gives them an advantage (e.g. publishing lots of BS papers and advancing their careers) then they are (and we know they are, meta studies and experienced academics say and show so). There's nothing of the "Area 51/Illuminati" kind of conspiracy thinking about this, if that's what you imply.
Rather it is the classic self-advancement BS that goes on since the world started, where people exploit loopholes and cheat to get ahead. That includes scientists, especially in today's publish or perish climate.
That doesn't mean at all that I'm against science. In fact, the opposite is the case – I'm against bad science, pseudo-science, and bad science writing because I'm so ardently in favour of good science.
Of course, there is also a growing trend against scientific hubris (and against "experts" in general) because of highly visible expert failures in the fields of nutrition and economics, for example. I don't so much think this is anti-science in general (people still love the fruits of science, after all), but anti-arrogance.
Harder jargon sometimes does so too and especially custom underdefined notation.
It's not just readability that's a problem, it's also that relevant code, data, etc are scattered all over the internet.
Another problem is that many people struggle with english which is the defacto language for research. This introduces two problems: first, one must learn to speak english, then, one must learn how to trawl through academicese.
There have been various similar projects to wikipaper in the past, but one of the reasons that they fail is that not many researchers have the spare time to contribute to a project like this. I spoke to the guys running Google Scholar and they told me this is the biggest problem. I believe I have an innovative way to solve this problem however, anyone who wants more details please get in touch.
I believe that making it easier to understand research going on in neighboring fields will dramatically increase the rate at which research is performed.
https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/ via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13932806