Treating academia as one homogeneous group isn't helpful. In my field (CS) good authors do use concise and easy to understand language to get their points across. Of course domain specific jargon is included, but that is not surprising, as you can convey much more information this way (as you don't have to explain all known concepts over and over again). The target audience is usually well familiar with the language. Scientific writing is not usually meant to be consumed by readers outside a certain community.
> Treating academia as one homogeneous group isn't helpful
I disagree. Academia by and large has a lot of common traits. I've been a programmer for a loooong time, and the majority of academic CS papers are opaque and inaccessible like most other academic papers I've read. I'll grant you that CS papers are generally easier to read (and not just because I'm a programmer), but that doesn't excuse the usual academic lack of clarity.
> Scientific writing is not usually meant to be consumed by readers outside a certain community.
That is a big problem tho, because it means journalists can't understand the papers. It means people can't easily verify information themselves without hours of effort. It means that papers with good information go largely unread and not understood for decades until someone resurrects it.
Clarity in writing is really important, especially when the information is precise and nuanced. Academia as a whole has done a pretty poor job of teaching people how to write papers that convey information well. I don't think its unfair to paint academia that way as a whole. And I think it is helpful for people to bring this up and make people (especially people in academia) realize that this is a bigger problem than they think.
It’s impossible to argue meaningfully without an example (for a field with tens of thousands of papers a year), but the purpose of academic papers is to convince experts of the ideas. If the paper is clear enough for an expert, it is serving its intended purpose. People are free to write blog posts and summarize papers on YouTube in a simplified way but it’s not compatible with technical writing and will likely get the paper rejected if it is done there. Journalists should consult with experts not unlike any layman consulting a lawyer for legal advice.
For a concrete example, you can’t explain algorithmic complexity precisely and also make the explanation accessible to general audiences. One is inherently mathematical and the other is just intuition. The math is exactly precise and for the same reason hard to digest.
> it’s not compatible with technical writing and will likely get the paper rejected if it is done there
Something seems to be going wrong there if easy to understand writing is rejected by papers.
> Journalists should consult with experts not unlike any layman consulting a lawyer for legal advice.
That's pretty gate-keepery. Also, it clearly hasn't been working. Having to consult a laywer for legal advice is a consequence of our extraordinarily and unnecessarily complex code of law and court system. Its not a good thing. Consulting experts just isn't feasible for most people. Its not a good state of things IMO.
You need to provide an example of a highly cited paper with low clarity otherwise the clarity concept is vague.
Even if it is true that papers are unclear, the incentives for academics is to get prestige, which follows from getting papers accepted, which follows from getting (usually) 3 experts to say their paper is the least terrible paper in their stack. Professors need 30-40 papers in 5-6 years so journalists reading their paper for a 2 minute story is probably not on their radar. The process for getting a paper accepted is tuned precisely to be understood by the 3 reviewers, and further synthesis is out of scope.
Basically, it is incorrect to view papers as a way to spread knowledge to the masses (this is a common stance taken by science), but they are rather a form of academic currency which can be converted into other digestible forms, such as books. Often the knowledge in the paper is not even yet broadly accepted and may even be unsafe/incorrect e.g., medical research. So yes, consult with experts.
> That is a big problem tho, because it means journalists can't understand the papers. ...
When I thought about this, I immediately thought of a "TL;DR" section for any academic paper... until I realized that that's what the Abstract / Conclusion is sort of meant to be.
> ... the majority of academic CS papers are opaque and inaccessible like most other academic papers I've read.
The majority of CS papers' Abstract / Conclusion are also quite 'opaque and inaccessible'. Having gone through a fair share of CS papers myself (being a part of CS research), trying to get into a new area of CS is really hard when I try to read more recent academic papers, not just because of the technical jargon involved, but because of the unnecessary complex sentences that are required to convey the author(s) idea. A lot of things could be made simpler and easier to grasp. I largely agree with "it is helpful for people to bring this up and make people (especially people in academia) realize that this is a bigger problem than they think."
