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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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).
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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Ah, right, agreed! Thanks Devon!
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I strongly agree with this. I was angrily told by someone that there's no such thing as a concept that can't be explained simply to laypeople, with some goofy feynman cite... just not true.
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In the case of that paper, I think it all _can_ be explained simply to experts. There's just a lot - a lot of single words that would need paragraph or page-long explanations. And so 23 pages -> 500 pages. Meanwhile, the core message - what's new - would largely be buried.
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