Tfw you're not following a technical paper and not sure if (a) you're misunderstanding something obvious, (b) it's just plain bad writing, or (c) the concept simply doesn't make sense
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Hahaha of course not, their goal is to look smarter than you!
Usually not. Most of the time, the authors aren't interested in you. They're talking to other experts, and writing that way is a far more effective way to communicate (not to mention often making papers far shorter).
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Touches a nerve, tbh. I've put so much effort into making technical papers well written. But something like https://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/0701004.pdf … would need to be hundreds of pages to be written for non-experts. And doing so would damage expert understanding.
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Oh of course not saying it's true of all technical writing, just that it's a failure mode I've seen more than once Relevant context: a lot of recent experience informed from crypto whitepapers, whose incentive often is to look as impressive as possible rather than clarity
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I think even adjusting for this, academic papers are written in a really stilted style that doesn't help communicate anything except ingroup membership.
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