I have seen people write about other people's work: "it's so confusing that it must be good" but of coursing using 10x more words to get at this fallacious conclusion. Depressing to think some scientists think like this, and I didn't believe it myself until I saw it 1st hand.
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When I say I didn't believe it, I'd suspected it, but had not ruled out other reasons they might be concluding the work was good. When I finally saw this written out, I lost a lot of (all?) respect for a whole swathe of people. Hopefully though some might eventually come around!
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Replying to @o_guest
Yes, that is often the case. People tend to believe that flamboyant discourse hides relevant meaning.
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Replying to @twitemp1
Not just flamboyant though! Also boring and mind-numbing prose is deemed as good.
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Replying to @twitemp1
I have a hunch it's a problem with calibrating yourself versus others. Often things that are important/good are hard, but after PhD it gets less and likely that important things like journal articles are hard to read — this excludes maths, stats, programming!
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But for some reason some of us stay at the calibration: a journal article that is hard to read is hard because I have a gap. That's very unlikely when we're talking about your own field and even related fields if you are anything above 1st/2nd year PhD student.
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What is likely — very likely in fact! — is that some of our peers (including ourselves of course!) might not be very good at explaining complex concepts. Reading and understanding is easy when the writer has done a good job.
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Replying to @o_guest
Yes, agree but why people praise incomprehensible writing then? As a way to compensate for their own insecurity perhaps?
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Replying to @twitemp1
Well, if they make the jump from "I can't understand this" to "Therefore... it must be good" then it's of course the case they will praise something they deem good/outside their reach.
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Perhaps this is what @zerdeve is getting at in a side-thread: if you really wanna nail them (not in an aggressive way of course) you totally can. Ask something like: what did you learn from this work? What are the contributions to the field? Etc. They won't be able to tell you.
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