This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
You're one of the good ones!
If you're trying to be understood, a good rule of thumb is this: Dumb it down further than you think you need to. Pretty much everyone overestimates the intelligence/patience/contextual awareness of their reader.
Or as we say in computer land, it's easier to write code than to read it.
I can understand, however, that this can go against the need of the academic to sound intelligent. But it seems like you aren't motivated by that. Anecdotally, I think your writing on themotte is very clear.
I think a lot of this is variance across disciplines. I was an immunologist and my impression was that the field wasn't generally overrun with bad writing, or at least not the kind of bad writing that I associate with obscurantism. I just went back and tried to take a fresh-eyed look at my most cited paper (which is now old enough that it is almost fresh to read it again) and the thing that would probably be worst for someone outside the field is the alphabet soup nature of cytokine nomenclature. I don't think there's anything to be done about that though, there really just are a lot of cytokines that have conflicting roles in different contexts, differential regulation that's tricky to understand, and names that all kind of sound that same if they're not your old pals.
Other fields trend to either side of this. If I go pick up a physics paper, I'm in over my head pretty quickly (although not if I go to the Nature Physics website where I'm met with titles like Racial equity in physics education research and Towards meaningful diversity, equity and inclusion in physics learning environments on the home page). This isn't because of the authors putting on a show though, their material really is complex and requires a fair bit of background knowledge to avoid getting swamped pretty quickly. In contrast, the Journal of Sociology is silly, resulting in a more performative approach to the work, such as it is.
I'm sure someone has already done it, but something I've been bouncing around a bit is the idea of irreducible complexity in different thought domains. Some things are complex simply because they really are complex, there just isn't any simple way to understand them that doesn't become lossy. Other things really aren't all that complex, but the people in the profession both benefit from complexity and personally enjoy adding it on (much of law seems this way to me when I look at arguments). This shouldn't be read as saying that people in these fields are stupid - unfortunately, it's quite the opposite, they're clever enough to add many layers of complexity to something that should be intelligible to anyone that's interested.
This is an accurate description of software development for the past 10 years.
More options
Context Copy link
I am sorely tempted to make a "Stop Discovering New Cytokines" meme off the usual template . Interleukins were at their best when they were fodder for speculative Michael Crichton novels.
Accursed immunologists, almost as bad as the geneticists when it comes to bloating up medical textbooks.
My grandpappy never heard of DNA till he was done with med school, and it didn't do him no harm.
shakes fist
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Do you have any specific examples in mind of academic writing that you think is needlessly complicated? Most accusations of intentional obfuscation are overblown, I think.
It’s normal for specialized fields to develop their own jargon. I’m in a few niche (non-academic) hobbies and newcomers often accuse us of intentional obfuscation. But to the experienced regulars our words are perfectly clear.
Academics write for fellow academics, people much like themselves with a similar educational background and usually a similar intelligence level. So they have a pretty good idea of what their readers will find clear and what they won’t.
There’s a problem today where some sub-sub-fields are so specialized that the audience of fellow specialists who are actually capable of understanding the work becomes very small, but I think that’s ultimately a separate issue.
This might be foreign to some people, but, using big words is fun. Reading and understanding a complex piece with lots of big words and dense references is also fun (if it’s well written to begin with of course). It’s not always a nefarious plot to bolster one’s social status. Some people just really enjoy reading and writing large amounts of complex text, and unsurprisingly those tend to be the kind of people who go into careers in academia where they get paid to do just that. So I absolutely don’t fault someone for not squeezing all his content into the smallest number of words possible. As the popular saying goes: let him cook.
Intentional obfuscation - sometimes. Far more I observe obfuscated language caused by the authors being sloppy and/or avoiding speaking plainly if they didn't understand something.
Most common: Enamored with big words yet trying to meet the journal word count limit, a big word is used in a way the meaning of the sentence becomes imprecise. Sometimes they have obtained a minor result, but big words are used to make it sound more important than it is. (Others will misunderstand and take the big words a a face value.)
Sometimes the authors are sloppy to extent that they understand meaning of some concept differently than others and never bother to make it explicit. Often the difference in understanding is a genuine difference in scientific opinion, but sometimes (especially in a run-of-a-mill study) it is because the authors failed to understand something. Sometimes the authors have followed "best practices" but do not understand the arguments for the best practices, producing slightly nonsensical approach. Sometimes authors claim to have found a $thing when they actually found $anotherthing. A mistake or misunderstanding is seldom admitted.
Sometimes the authors are sloppy reading or understanding the previous literature: when I see a paper cited in support of simplistic oneliner statement, these days I am never certain the cited reference supports the statement as clearly as implied ("It is known that system of soothing provides excellent results, thus we followed the approach of Tarr and Fether (1845)" -> go read Tarr and Fether, there is no single coherent system of soothing described, but three, and if you ignore the discussion but look at the results, the implications are unclear. Sometimes I suspect malice, more often I suspect laziness -- they never read Tarr and Fether, but they read something else that claimed to use the method of Tarr and Feather and misunderstood it.)
I see a lot of Science by Obfuscation. It's frustrating, because when I'm asked to review one of these papers, I don't know on the front end whether it's garbage or is genuinely using interesting and esoteric techniques from another area of literature that I'm just not familiar with. The latter is a real possibility that I have to spend a lot of time figuring out. Thankfully, I've only very rarely had to throw up my hands and tell the editors that I personally can't figure out what they're on about, and that maybe someone else would be a better reviewer. Unfortunately, the vast vast majority of my other experience is that once I can cut through their language to figure out what they're actually doing, I realize that it's really just dumb simple under the hood, and usually they don't really have any "contribution" over what has come before.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link