research papers can all be read by "people in the field".
its just that someone who is doing environmental physics doesn't necessarily understand papers on string theory. science is specialized, yea. if you want to understand research papers, get an education.
or just do something else. cutting edge research is not for everyone. not everyone is supposed to understand it. whats next? people demanding research papers be dumbed down to adhere to the freedom of information act?
science is hard. big deal. you cant have all the things at the same time. read the hawking books written for casuals if you want a cute little story about science.
> research papers can all be read by "people in the field".
Not necessarily. The classic example is Shinichi Mochizuki's work.
He's done some incredible work but he's basically invented his entire field out of thin air, he doesn't publish frequently, and the papers he does publish are essentially impenetrable.
He likes it this way and doesn't want to "dumb down" his work for the mere mortals who need to review it. That's essentially the end state of your argument - if you can't comprehend it you're not "in his field" and you're obviously not qualified to discuss it. And he's certainly not going to waste his time teaching some dunces the basics of his field.
For the casual reader, the "bad writing" aspect of the difficulty is severely outweighed by the "lack of domain knowledge" aspect, by several orders of magnitude. If you take a random modern research paper, and put it through a handful of editors to make it superbly written in a clear, convincing language that gets its points across very easily, the casual reader uneducated in the background knowledge will barely be able to tell the difference.
A large part of any scientists job is communicating results. The people you criticize may not be novelists, but they are certainly professionals when it comes to communicating technical knowledge.
However, this knowledge is only communicated to other experts in the same - often very narrow - subfield. Often the definitions that give you a hard time when reading a paper have been refined over several years and are basically known to all other people working in the same field.
This is not ideal, but there is simply not enough manpower to produce good and generally accessible summaries of current research topics every few months...
> The people you criticize may not be novelists, but they are certainly professionals when it comes to communicating technical knowledge.
No, that's the point I'm trying to make. They do not have enough training in making themselves understood. Hell, a good portion of them don't even have the language in which they are writing as their primary language.
Plus, it seems that authors sometimes feel compelled to appear smarter by leaving out the intuition and motivation behind a result, and in particular the easier and more intuitive simple cases (which might have been the inspiration for the result in the first place), and instead present only the most abstract & most general version of the result that they managed to prove.
Including some of the enlightening historical path towards that result is not "dumbing things down".
show me one paper that you cant understand because of the grammar but would be perfectly fine reading it if only the lyrical style was a bit more up your alley.
Effective communication is about far more than whether the reader/viewer can eventually understand the material. Even basic presentation skills can make a huge difference both to the speed at which someone can receive and understand new information and to how well they will retain that information later.
Unfortunately, many academics receive little if any training in good presentation before being expected to lecture or write at undergraduate or graduate level, and while some are naturally gifted presenters anyway, most inevitably are not. Consequently, many career academics have no idea how poor their presentation skills are, how ineffective their presentation is as a direct result, or how much better they could be. They just get stuck at a very low level, but without the kind of introductory/remedial training that would be given to someone whose career involved presentation skills in the professional world. And of course if anyone with broader experience dares to suggest that there might be room for improvement, the instinctive reaction is denial.
A little irony is that some of the most engaging and informative presenters I have ever seen or read come from that same community, but despite the emphasis on peer review in their research work, when it comes to soft skills the weaker presenters typically have no idea how bad they are and therefore make no attempt to learn from their stronger colleagues and improve.
Unfortunately, as your own choice of word "exceptional" implies, most are not so lucky.
I once sat in a review meeting at the end of a year with members of the faculty responsible for teaching collecting feedback from many of the undergraduate students. When challenged about the poor quality of many lectures, the response was essentially that they can't make the lecturers go and learn how to lecture competently because the lecturers wouldn't stand for it.
Try that attitude in the professional world and you'd be in a remedial programme on your way to getting fired.
Fortunately, I expect that with the advances in modern technology and changes in modern careers, the old-school universities that think a famous name and charging high fees mean they can get away with anything will soon be obsolete, and so will the incompetent parts of the academic community sheltering within them. They will need to find new ways to offer dramatically more value than interested people can find on their own with all the modern resources we have available, or they won't be able to justify people taking several years out of their lives and paying a fortune in fees to attend any more.
