“Academia is being esoteric” or in other words “academia is a pompous twat”.
It just makes us feel cool in our endless misery
I dated a girl who acted like writing / talking like that made her better / smarter than other people. She got off on the elitism. I’m no academic slouch, but my philosophy is if you can’t break it down in basic terms that anyone can understand, then you don’t understand it enough yourself.
I don’t agree, there’s a reason why we need people like Carl Sagan and Neil DeGrasse Tyson explaining things in simpler terms and that they’re not the people doing the research itself…
and that they’re not the people doing the research itself…
I don’t think that’s relevant. People like Stephen Hawking and Brian Greene have also done great at explaining science to the general public.
Sure, but not being able to explain it in layman’s terms doesn’t mean you don’t understand what you’re working on and in fact the majority of scientists and engineers and programmers and highly specialized individuals aren’t very good at vulgarization for the simple reason that they don’t need to do it when they’re accomplishing the work and outside of that they’re not required to explain their work to laymen since there are people specialized in doing just that.
I could break stuff down to you but I won’t because I have shit to do and there’s textbooks. Also your eyes would glaze over 2% of the way in. So in that sense, I can’t, because I can’t make you actually want to understand it. Best I can do is hand-wave and rely on you not understanding why my explanation falls short of actually being one, making you think you understood something.
Talking shop and obfuscation are not the same thing but are generally indistinguishable for the uninitiated. I guess what I’m mostly miffed about is the implication that’s going on in OP’s erudite thesis and your anecdote: That people who talk about stuff you don’t understand do it to exclude. Maybe, you know, stuff is just complicated and needs years of study and practice to understand. It’s not a status thing, someone with a Ph.D in chemistry will have quite a task ahead of them understanding what hair stylists are talking about when talking shop about chemicals unless they themselves happen to specialise in that area. Now try explaining conditioner chemistry to a philosopher, instead, it’s probably hopeless.
I would go so far as to say that knowing and understanding something is only half of the issue. The other half is being able to clearly convey it to others. And that’s where a lot of people (myself included) fall short.
I think any scientist should able to convey at least the high level concepts that they’re working on at the level that a smart 12th-grader can follow. If you can’t do that, I think that’s a sign that you’re probably not thinking about your work very clearly. Being able to distill things and context-switch back to a birds-eye view of your work is critical for knowing what direction you’re heading in.
(I say this from the perspective of a climate scientist - our field has a pretty active public/lay conversation and lots of science comma, but I think the concept still applies to other sciences, and social sciences.)
I’m still pissed at being forced to write in a passive voice in university. It’s awkward and carries less information, and makes it seem like nobody had any agency, science just kind of happened on its own and you were there to observe it.
I don’t know why anyone would prefer something like “An experiment was conducted and it was found that…”
To the much better “We conducted an experiment and found…”
I asked ChatGPT to convert the text to common words:
“Academic writing is often hard to understand because it uses complicated words specific to a particular field, making it easier for experts to communicate with each other but harder for outsiders to follow. This keeps certain knowledge limited to a small group of people and maintains a cycle where only the educated or ‘in’ crowd can fully engage, while others are left out.”
You should ask ChatGPT to generate some porn so you can go fuck off with it. Sick of hearing about these LLMs.
They can absolutely be useful tools if you use them right. They’re just quite overhyped at the moment.
I think this leaves out the “epistemological imperative”, which I understand as the compulsion to use this specific language for the sake of being scientifically accurate. Particularly when dealing with peers, who will all too readily hold you accountable for inaccuracies, being precise is important, possibly even necessary to avoid the scientific community’s habit of tearing into any error to prove their own proficiency by showing up your deficiency.
I can’t find my source any more, unfortunately, but I read an article once about how students are essentially scared to have their writing torn to shreds because they were too direct in their assertions. I recall that it related an anecdote about birds on a movie set that were supposed to all fly away at the sound of a gunshot. Except they tried to fly away beforehand, so the solution was to tie them to the branch and release that wire when they were supposed to fly. Then the birds tried anyway, didn’t get anywhere, ended up hanging upside down and falling unconscious. When they tried again (after restoring the birds to consciousness), they released the wire… but the birds had learned that trying to fly away was unpleasant, so they just sat there instead. Why bother, if you go nowhere?
In the same manner, academics who write too clearly will end up getting bad grades, have papers rejected, essentially be punished for it. They may learn that, by carefully coaching their assertions, assumptions or just about anything that could be conceived as a statement of facts in a multi-layered insulation of qualifying statements and vague circumscriptions to avoid saying something wrong and show the acknowledgement that, like science in general, the causation they’re ascribing this phenomenon to is at best an educated guess and, while we can narrow down things that are not true, we can never be certain that things we assume are true really are and won’t be refuted somewhere down the line, making them look like morons…
I lost track of the sentence. Anyway, if you make mistakes, you’ll get attacked. Most people don’t like being attacked. So if you’ve been attacked enough, eventually you’ll either give up or adopt strategies to avoid being attacked.
Being complex and obscure in your phrasing makes it harder to attack you. And if it’s hard to understand you, people might just skim the points and not bother with the attackable details anway. If you notice that people who write in a difficult style don’t get attacked as much or as badly, you’ll adopt that style too.
Eventually, your writing is read by students stepping to fill your shoes. They may not understand why you write this way, but they see that many successful academics do. They may also experience the same attacks and come to the same conclusion. Either way, your caution has inspired a new generation of academic writers who will continue that trend.
Finally you’ll end up with a body of scientific knowledge that only experts can still navigate. They know to skim past the vagueness, indirections and qualifications, mostly understand the terms and can take the time to pick apart the details if something strikes them as odd. The common rube doesn’t understand jack shit. Your research may further the understanding of a small group of people, possibly see some practical use, but the general public can’t directly make any use of it.
