Hmmmm

Comments

• iAvicenna@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  some papers are almost like they are trying to keep the core idea a secret

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  • InputZero@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Unfortunately there’s a bit of pressure to osbficate the core idea of a publication in academia. While the ideal academics try to hold themselves to is to freely exchange information, for researchers who are paid to study very neiche topics there’s an insensitive to put some resistance into others entering their field. There is only so much funding and one more team means more competition. So some researchers who find themselves in that position will intentionally complicate their published work as a way to create a disincentive to others from crowding their field. It sucks but the reality is that funding and money come before the faithful pursuit of knowledge.

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    • Madison420@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Incentive*

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• HollowNaught@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  I’m currently writing a small literature review on tgf-b and SMAD signalling in cancer for uni rn

  And I’m really confused why this one paper’s talking about how miR-520h induces the tgf-b/smad7 pathway but also binds to and suppresses smad7

  Like why on earth is it activating the tgf-b/smad7 pathway, a pathway that stops stuff like the epithelial mesenchynal transition, if it’s just going to bind to smad7 anyway???

  Worst thing is, I can’t find any other papers on why this actually happens

  I swear I’m just dumb at times ;-;

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  • runner_g@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Cell signalling pathways was the worst part of microbial genetics for me. Luckily I don’t have to deal with that anymore as my day to day is digital PCR and NGS.

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  • BluesF@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Ah, yes. Of course. I understand your frustration entirely because of my deep understanding of the specific situation.

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  • fossilesque@mander.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Would a list of tools and search engines be helpful?

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    • HollowNaught@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      That would be very helpful 🥴

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  • prex@aussie.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Image

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    • tetris11@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I’ll take two scoops

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• Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  c l a n g

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• shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  quick rant

  i’m so tired of over the top “intellectual” vocabulary in academia. a lot of concepts could be explained with simple words and would get the point across just as well, or better, and additionally make the conversation more accessible to those outside of a specific field. Why do you need to use big smart words to explain simple things? Is it because it tickles your ego when people need 10 minutes to comprehend one sentence? argh

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  • LazerFX@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I’m academia? How about Wikipedia, an encyclopedia that should be written (at least at synopsis level) clearly and for the casual reader. However, anything mathematics related and… Fuck you, you don’t know how to calculate an integral? Git gud, scrub.

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    • ftbd@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      In high school, I used to be frustrated by this as well. But now, I’ve come to appreciate being able to get a reminder for a definition or a famous result just by googling and clicking on the resulting wikipedia page. Way better than having to find and dig through a badly-scanned pdf of a paper from the 70s which presented the definition that everyone in the field now uses.

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  • BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    If you want to get published you’ve got to sound the part. No fancy words => no publishing => no grant money => less sciencing and more flipping burgers

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      yeah i know, second part of the rant went into how capitalism is shit but i feel like a broken record saying that constantly, it’s true of course, but i want to talk about some other things sometimes too

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  • yamanii@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    To reach the necessary amount of pages so I can graduate.

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  • InFerNo@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I always thought it had to do with avoiding ambiguity. By using a specific word with a specific meaning, you don’t need to expand on the context. I think I read that somewhere a long time ago and just accepted it.

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  • SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    100%. This is actually the entire reason I dropped out of my masters program.

    I’m a science communicator. My whole purpose for existing is making science accessible to people with less formal science training than a high school student.

    I was going for a masters in conservation biology, because what better to communicate these days, right? And in the limnology class I took the first semester, all my papers got poor marks for failing to use the unnecessary academic terminology. It was all entirely correct information, just simplified, and that was unacceptable.

    And I can’t work under those terms. I just am entirely incapable of making things overly complicated for no reason. It’s a force for specificity sometimes, but usually what it actually does is limit the reach of the work. And that’s just stupid.

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  • _____@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    There’s a popular figure in a fringe topic who’s contributed to computer science enough to have earned respect (and rightfully so) who writes these fringe articles with so much fanfare and pretentiousness that the entire meaning is impossible to extract.

    It just ends up sounding like a pretentious word salad.

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  • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Is it really science, if it doesn’t sound like something Neil deGrasse Tyson would say to himself for 30 minutes straight in front of his bathroom mirror?

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    • OozingPositron@feddit.cl ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      While he tries to kiss himself somewhere other than his lips?

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      lmao that’s the other extreme. I’m just complaining about unnecessary complexity when there is no need for it. It’s tiring to have to keep translating academic back into English, especially when you want to explain the concept to someone who’s having trouble understanding it/is not as familiar with it as you are

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  • keepthepace@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Me as an intern in a lab, being asked among others to review a draft

    Hey, can you explain to me equation 3.1? I am not sure what N and Q refers to?

    Oh that one I just copied from another paper, it is not really important to the argument.

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    • Someonelol@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      The lack of labeling each variable (with units!) in equations really boils my piss. Yes the author knows them by heart, but even peers in the same field could struggle to understand what they mean. If introductory chemistry and physics instructors beat the practice into their students I see no excuse for authors to leave them out in a thesis.

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  • jtl@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    For sure, you occasionally run into some obscurantism, and that’s problematic. In my field, bad writing is usually just from people not writing in their native language.

    But look, you have to acknowledge, some stuff is just hard. There is often just an unavoidable barrier to entry. I think behind a lot of this sentiment is the assumption that academics are just twiddling their thumbs for 10 years through undergrad and grad school, and anyone should be able to walk into the kind of conversations they’re having after all that. I mean, most of the time, not really. We go a learn a bunch of stuff and our colleagues learn similar things, and we then assume a common framework and some common knowledge, both of which are generally not widely available to the general public.

    Where I got my PhD, we all had to write a lay summary of the thesis. It’s good they made us do it, but we always used to laugh about it. There’s usually too much assumed background for a useful lay summary to even be possible. You just end up with a very vague facsimile of a summary of the type of thing you’re doing.

    It might depend on the field. I have no doubt that the average paper in my field is unavoidably going to be pretty inscrutable to laypeople, and that’s mostly fine. Maybe in some other fields it’s more avoidable, somehow, but again I’d have to imagine that if people are spending their time productively in the academic system they’ll have picked up a bunch of background mostly unavailable to most people.

    As a PS, there’s also something weird to me in general about people thinking that they know how to do other peoples’ jobs better than them. See it all the time with retail, planning, media etc, people can’t seem to fathom that things may be the way they are for good reasons that they aren’t privy to.

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    • rustydrd@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I think there’s still a difference between describing a concept in a way laypeople would understand and describing it using plain English. The latter is what I consider good scientific writing.

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  • Chrobin@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    The only field where it’s actually justified: math. In math, every time has an exact definition behind it, and you have to use the exact term.

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  • jaggedrobotpubes@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Inferior writers, inferior minds.

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  • ICastFist@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That same problem can be seen in law and it’s a lot more relevant to the average citizen than academic papers, since “know your rights” means jack shit if you have no fucking clue what the words mean.

    It’s snobbish gatekeeping to feel superior to the filthy plebs

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      goodness, don’t even get me started on law. I had a hard time reading my tenancy agreement, and I know I’m not a stupid person. I’m not saying this to brag, but how is someone, let’s say less intellectually inclined, supposed to deal with that? Sign whatever paper they get told allows them to have shelter and hope they didn’t just sell their firstborn to the landlord?

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  • ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Funny thing is that psych papers tend to be very readable

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  • Kalkaline@leminal.space ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    What kills me a little is when someone has to come up with some nebulous acronym that we’re all supposed to know but no one ever defines it at the beginning of the document. In EEG we like to change the name of what are now known as lateralized periodic discharges. I have a document with about 25 different terms that all describe different terminology that’s been used to describe that EEG finding.

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    • Bougie_Birdie@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Meanwhile I’m in here thinking, I wonder what EEG means?

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  • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I despise this, too. I work in a pretty technical field and actively throw bricks at people who write like this.

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    • jollyrogue@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Do you have a book? Can people donate brick funds?

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    • slacktoid@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Can I join you in your next brick throwing?

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    • shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      thank you for your service o7

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• Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  My life got so much better when I started assuming the former.

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  • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yep.

    When I was in high school, I was upset that I didn’t know enough.

    When I was in my 30s, I worked hard to fully understand everything.

    Now I’m in my 40s and I just assume I’m stupid. I got nothing to prove. If I’m convincing a group that’s paying me to explain some architecture, sure. But a group of bros who want me to weigh in on why the sky is Green, bruh IDGAF.

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  • jballs@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    I feel like that’s good advice for reasonably intelligent people. But it’s kind of a slippery slope, especially for people that are dumb as shit. For example, my neighbor became a hard antivaxxer during COVID.

    She mistrusted everything that was actually science, assuming that she since she didn’t understand what qualified professionals were saying, they must be wrong. But if someone could make a simple (even if incredibly wrong) argument on YouTube, shed eat that shit up.

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• EvilCartyen@feddit.dk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  The argument is also sometimes as dumb as it looks

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• Tarogar@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Why not both?

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  • EpeeGnome@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yeah, a little of column A, a little from column B.

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• FireRetardant@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Yes

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