I hadn't actually considered academic writing as an expression of sociopathic manipulation until now, but it explains a lot.

This is perfect

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.

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

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.

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.

I understood about 45% of that, and I also hate them.

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.

Jargon is only legitimate when it clarifies more than plain English. If it does, fine, use it.

I think this leaves out the "epistemological imperative", which I understand as the compulsion to use this specific language for the sake of being scientifically accurate. Particularly when dealing with peers, who will all too readily hold you accountable for inaccuracies, being precise is important, possibly even necessary to avoid the scientific community's habit of tearing into any error to prove their own proficiency by showing up your deficiency.

I can't find my source any more, unfortunately, but I read an article once about how students are essentially scared to have their writing torn to shreds because they were too direct in their assertions. I recall that it related an anecdote about birds on a movie set that were supposed to all fly away at the sound of a gunshot. Except they tried to fly away beforehand, so the solution was to tie them to the branch and release that wire when they were supposed to fly. Then the birds tried anyway, didn't get anywhere, ended up hanging upside down and falling unconscious. When they tried again (after restoring the birds to consciousness), they released the wire... but the birds had learned that trying to fly away was unpleasant, so they just sat there instead. Why bother, if you go nowhere?

In the same manner, academics who write too clearly will end up getting bad grades, have papers rejected, essentially be punished for it. They may learn that, by carefully coaching their assertions, assumptions or just about anything that could be conceived as a statement of facts in a multi-layered insulation of qualifying statements and vague circumscriptions to avoid saying something wrong and show the acknowledgement that, like science in general, the causation they're ascribing this phenomenon to is at best an educated guess and, while we can narrow down things that are not true, we can never be certain that things we assume are true really are and won't be refuted somewhere down the line, making them look like morons...

I lost track of the sentence. Anyway, if you make mistakes, you'll get attacked. Most people don't like being attacked. So if you've been attacked enough, eventually you'll either give up or adopt strategies to avoid being attacked.

Being complex and obscure in your phrasing makes it harder to attack you. And if it's hard to understand you, people might just skim the points and not bother with the attackable details anway. If you notice that people who write in a difficult style don't get attacked as much or as badly, you'll adopt that style too.

Eventually, your writing is read by students stepping to fill your shoes. They may not understand why you write this way, but they see that many successful academics do. They may also experience the same attacks and come to the same conclusion. Either way, your caution has inspired a new generation of academic writers who will continue that trend.

Finally you'll end up with a body of scientific knowledge that only experts can still navigate. They know to skim past the vagueness, indirections and qualifications, mostly understand the terms and can take the time to pick apart the details if something strikes them as odd. The common rube doesn't understand jack shit. Your research may further the understanding of a small group of people, possibly see some practical use, but the general public can't directly make any use of it.

Not bad

You should ask ChatGPT to generate some porn so you can go fuck off with it. Sick of hearing about these LLMs.

French scholars are famous for their mastery of obscurantism. That's what this is called.

Yeah, it's dumb. We write like normal people in academic papers too. I don't know why they ever taught it this way.

That also sounds odd to me. I've been consistently taught in school to avoid passive voice and it was a huge struggle for me for a long time (case in point). I'm attending a college in Canada for the record.

I got taught that rule in my freshman year, but then my thesis advisor told me to stop doing that because "only old people write like that"

So I suppose academia is evolving (however you still aren't allowed to use first person speech)

'floofier' should be standard academic jargon

It's legit a great topic. Scientists need to remember that communication is an important skill.

I could break stuff down to you but I won't because I have shit to do and there's textbooks. Also your eyes would glaze over 2% of the way in. So in that sense, I can't, because I can't make you actually want to understand it. Best I can do is hand-wave and rely on you not understanding why my explanation falls short of actually being one, making you think you understood something.

Talking shop and obfuscation are not the same thing but are generally indistinguishable for the uninitiated. I guess what I'm mostly miffed about is the implication that's going on in OP's erudite thesis and your anecdote: That people who talk about stuff you don't understand do it to exclude. Maybe, you know, stuff is just complicated and needs years of study and practice to understand. It's not a status thing, someone with a Ph.D in chemistry will have quite a task ahead of them understanding what hair stylists are talking about when talking shop about chemicals unless they themselves happen to specialise in that area. Now try explaining conditioner chemistry to a philosopher, instead, it's probably hopeless.

I would go so far as to say that knowing and understanding something is only half of the issue. The other half is being able to clearly convey it to others. And that’s where a lot of people (myself included) fall short.

If you need an example of this read republic book 1.

Socrates essentially just dunks on these guys that are trying to define justice.

One of them says that justice is doing good to your friends and evil to your enemies

The way that socrates reubuts this argument is that the fella in question doesn't define friends, enemies, good, or evil, so how can he expect to come up with an idea of what justice is before first defining these other concepts that are meaningful to us because of their common usage, but can be twisted greatly in logical argumentation.

I think the point is that academic writers use large terms, despite using them wrong, when diminutive ones would suffice.

They use big words for the sake of using big words. Whether they make any sense whatsoever, is entirely beside the point.

The text, as I understand it is essentially saying the same thing, using big words to obfuscate that they're actually saying something rather boring and simple, which also has the point of obfuscating the meaning of the text to anyone who isn't an academic; aka someone who isn't used to such nonsensical word play.

There's a good reason I've avoided any work in academic fields. They incorrectly use terms, which just muddies the water on what the hell they're actually saying. Not only because the terms are big/less known, but because they're often used wrong.

IMO, academics are morons who like to sound smart.

... Do you concur?