A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
I'm still pissed at being forced to write in a passive voice in university. It's awkward and carries less information, and makes it seem like nobody had any agency, science just kind of happened on its own and you were there to observe it.
I don't know why anyone would prefer something like "An experiment was conducted and it was found that..."
To the much better "We conducted an experiment and found..."
I asked ChatGPT to convert the text to common words:
"Academic writing is often hard to understand because it uses complicated words specific to a particular field, making it easier for experts to communicate with each other but harder for outsiders to follow. This keeps certain knowledge limited to a small group of people and maintains a cycle where only the educated or 'in' crowd can fully engage, while others are left out."
Not bad
"Academia is being esoteric" or in other words "academia is a pompous twat".
"You just said a bunch of big words I don't understand, so imma take it as disrespect."
I am unable to differentiate between the signal and the ambient stochastic background.
Reminds about GCC wiki.
What does reload do?
Good question. The what is still understandable. Don't ask about the how.
you know the academic jargon is bad when you can translate it into french and the sentence is almost the exact same
French scholars are famous for their mastery of obscurantism. That's what this is called.
Oh don't even get me started about french philosophers - philosophy in general is very guilty of this, but french are absolutely the worst. Entire books of complete jargon where the point seems to be to sound as fancy as possible without as little content as possible
or as Freud put it:
“So, I gave my lecture yesterday. Despite the lack of preparation, I spoke quite well and without hesitation, which I ascribe to the cocaine I had taken before hand. I told about my discoveries in brain anatomy, all very difficult things that the audience certainly did not understand, but all that matters is that they get the impression that I understand it.”
One of my favorite Calvin & Hobbs. :D
I hadn't actually considered academic writing as an expression of sociopathic manipulation until now, but it explains a lot.
This is perfect
inhales
Complex 1a was prepared according to well-known synthetic procedures. The reduction potential of the complex was increased due to the nephelauxetic expansion of the occupied FMOs induced by photolytic epimerization of the auxiliary tetrahydrophosphazolidine sulfide ligand to enable a strongly σ-donating dihaptic coordination mode.
translation: we made molecule 1a, we shouldn't need to tell you how, it's obvious, lmao, git gud. the molecule became less likely to gain extra electrons because shining light on it made one of its weird-ass totally-not-bullshit parts wiggle around a bit so that it could bind more strongly to the metal atom through two of its own adjacent atoms, making the metal atom's relevant electrons floofier.
The loser research paper vs the chad blog tutorial
^ literally anything related to buffer overflow attacks lol
Academic security research is constitutionally bad because academia as an environment selects people with a “hacker mentality” out at the freshman stage.
It’s inherently biased towards rule-followers. That’s not a bad thing, but it means it’s bad at some things. Such as computer security research.
In my first year of uni, I had to write a 20 page paper, so I wrote it about how academic writing sucks.
Cheeky as hell, but I got a good grade, and my teacher liked it
It's legit a great topic. Scientists need to remember that communication is an important skill.
I understood every word of that, and I hate you.
I understood about 45% of that, and I also hate them.
He said it's hard to see through the style of their writing because they use fancy language related to their field of work and it causes a vicious cycle of other people doing the same while excluding normal people.
In defense of jargon:
coming up with new ideas and expressing them to others requires new vocabulary. You can't simply say things in "plain English" especially when you want to communicate with peers.
This is why academia is so often refereed to as a discipline; you must train yourself in new ways of thinking. Making it accessible to the layperson is the job of scientific communicators, not scientists at large.
And it's not like this is a unique issue with acedemia, every organization I've ever participated in had special vocabulary if it was necessary or not.
Jargon is only legitimate when it clarifies more than plain English. If it does, fine, use it.
Many professionals (not only scientists) are really bad at crafting sentences and texts, even without jargon.
I get jargon, but even if you replace all of the jargon in a typical paper with simple words, the writing style is often horrible. It's often weirdly repetitive, has fluff-pieces and empty phrases, and just doesn't get to the point. (I'll ignore the inherent worthlessness of many articles here, since this is a symptom of funding policy)
I don't expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they're actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can't. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.
As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.
Academia is usually about minutiae, not concepts. Sometimes they get so hyperfocus in small areas that they are completely unable to give a general summary of what they are doing in the bigger picture. To do so would require them to understand things outside of their very narrow field of study.
Yeah, it's an in-group exclusivity signifier.
Shame, math is some of the worst at this, everything is named after some guy, so there's 0 semantic associativity, you either know exactly which Gaussian term they mean, or you are completely clueless even though they just mean noise with a normal distribution.
edit: Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It's so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they're just using an esoteric term to describe something you've used forever.
realize they're just using an esoteric term to describe something you've used forever.
Programming is applied math. Mathematicians say "theory of mass service", programmers say "schedulers". Well, it's "theory of mass service" in Russian, but in English it is "queue theory".
IT guy here, we suffer from a similar problem where everything is an acronym so it sounds like alphabet soup that if said as a word means sometimes you can't even quietly go look it up later. You either nod along knowing what it means or nod along not knowing what it means but having no chance to learn without outing yourself.
And then you have multiple identical abbreviations meaning different things or different things that are pronounced the same or multi billion dollar ompanies naming their product after existing words (like Microsoft Word or Office or Outlook...).
Mix in abbreviated customer names, names for servers and internal teams (no, not Microsoft Teams©) and everything is only an incomprehensible letter mumbo-jumbo.
And you can't out yourself because, in many workplace cultures, the appearance of knowing is more important than actually knowing. :/
I really like the naming of things after their discoverers/inventors. I'm picturing a mathematician getting upset:
"How dare you speak about Friedrich Gauss like that. He dragged that universities astronomy department out of the stone age, even after the death of his first wife..."
The history of the people helps me with remembering the concepts.
Disclaimer: I am NOT a mathematician.
My argument is not against naming things after the discoverer, though in engineering while we have some of this (Heaviside comes to mind), most other concepts have a semantic value so even unknown terms can be mapped fairly easily.
My main argument is that math is taught very poorly, if we had taught math as the history of math in school, this would be far more meaningful, we understand it as a story and each piece in the puzzle an event that brought it about.
Currently in a very inter-disciplinary field where the different mathematicians have their own language which has to be translated back into first software, then hardware. It’s so confusing at first till you spend 30 minutes on wikipedia to realize they’re just using an esoteric term to describe something you’ve used forever.
Yeah, this happens a lot. I studied math and I often got the impression that when you read other researcher's work, they describe the exact same thing that you have already heard about, but in a vastly different language. I wonder how many re-inventions and re-namings there are of any concept simply because people can't figure out that this thing has already been researched into. It really happens a lot, where 5 people discovered something, but gave them 5 different names.
It's even worse, math uses arcane terms for things that in many other fields are basically just accepted.
Galois fields? In hardware and software, those are just normal binary unsigned integers of a given bit length.
I get that GFs came about first, but when they were later implemented for computers they weren't usually (they are sometimes, mostly for carry less mul specifically, or when used for cryptography) called Galois fields, the behavior was just accepted as the default for digital logic.
The division operator of a Galois field (I prefer "finite field", because it's more descriptive) is nothing like the what computers usually use for unsigned integers. Like, if you're working mod 5, then 3/2 = 4 (because 2 * 4 = 8 = 3 mod 5).
Gotta love Dirichlet boundary conditions (the function has to have this value), Neumann boundary conditions (the derivative has to have this value) and Cauchy boundary conditions (both).
On the other hand, there's a bunch of things that are so abstract that it's difficult to give them a descriptive name, like rings, magmas and weasels
Oh i would say "ring" is in fact quite a descriptive term.
Apparently, in older german, "ringen" meant "to make progress of some sort/to fight for something". And a ring has two functions: addition and multiplication. These are the foundational functions that you can use to construct polynomials, which are very important functions. You could look at functions as a machine where you put something in and get something out.
In other words, you put something into a function, the function internally "makes some progress", and spits out a result. That is exactly what you can do with a "ring".
So it kinda makes sense, I guess.
Trying to teach yourself higher math without a textbook is nearly impossible.
You could try just Googling all the Greek letters and symbols but have fun sifting through the hundred-odd uses of σ for the one that's relevant to your context. And good fucking luck if it's baked into an image.
The quickest way I've gotten an intuition for a lot of higher math things was seeing it implemented in a programming language.
Is there an AcademicDictionary in the vein of Urban Dictionary for all the jargon and filler patterns?
It's something that people, in least in my field of microbiology, have been recently aware of and are trying to correct. The problem is not just an in-group signifier, since everyone, even experts, finds the author insufferable and difficult to understand
I dated a girl who acted like writing / talking like that made her better / smarter than other people. She got off on the elitism. I’m no academic slouch, but my philosophy is if you can’t break it down in basic terms that anyone can understand, then you don’t understand it enough yourself.