michael_nielsen

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

I’ve wondered why technical papers / publications aren’t more frequently written in plain English, such as via Medium... shouldn’t the goal be for readers to understand?

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).

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.

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.

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.