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[return to "Daunting papers/books and how to read them"]
1. billco+nb[view] [source] 2024-02-02 23:59:02
>>todsac+(OP)
why do they have to write papers in a way that the readers have to chewing on them.
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2. latenc+wD[view] [source] 2024-02-03 06:07:06
>>billco+nb
Papers are designed to be read by a specific audience of highly technical, skilled people in a topic where if it is original research, must be very explicit, and prove and disprove multiple things simultaneously.

Of course, standards vary significantly institution to institution and even person to person, and highly technical, skilled people are not indicative of full capability of reading, let alone reviewing the topic, doubly so when it is original research.

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3. dkjaud+zG[view] [source] 2024-02-03 06:51:26
>>latenc+wD
Let me translate this for the layman: papers are written using terms and notation that only makes sense if you've gone through the the process of learning their derivation from first principles in the narrow field in which they apply.

It has the odd effect of making this stuff comprehensible only to those that essentially already know what it is, and possibly a few people academically adjacent to those people.

Other people can decipher it, after long and arduous labor, but it essentially requires rediscovering the path that brought it about, knowing what the outcome will be. In that sense these papers are less useful than they seem.

Academia is a little like religion: to outsiders the language and rituals make little sense, only those indoctrinated in its tenets can achieve enlightenment.

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4. danbru+3L[view] [source] 2024-02-03 08:06:29
>>dkjaud+zG
I think this completely misses the point. A paper presents one new idea and builds on top of many existing ideas and generally assumes that the reader is familiar with all the existing ideas. And that is completely reasonable, the purpose of a paper is to concisely present the new idea, not to be a textbook that teaches you the entire field from the ground up.

That said, conveying an idea in an easily understandable way is hard and some authors will do better or worse than others. Also papers will usually not purely present the new idea but provide some context so that the reader only needs to be familiar with the topic up to the context but the amount of context given will vary a lot between papers.

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