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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Replying to @devonzuegel
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?
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Replying to @aleckretch
Hahaha of course not, their goal is to look smarter than you!
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Replying to @devonzuegel @aleckretch
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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Replying to @michael_nielsen @aleckretch
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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Replying to @michael_nielsen @aleckretch
I appreciate the push to clarification though, I (ironically) didn't make the original tweet very clear
0 replies 0 retweets 2 likesThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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