Clearly there’s a balance to be struck here: You want your posts to include everything that’s necessary for your audience to understand it, but no more. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, as they say. And clearly, the more technical a post is, the greater the risk that it won’t be understood.
However, when it comes to your example of scientific papers, I definitely do feel that some academicians should be more concise! For economics papers, often about 80% of the paper is simply repetition of what other people wrote, sometimes solely to show that the author did their research. Maybe 5% is original input, and the rest is repetition (again, less so for technical papers). Philosophers tend to be even worse!
Scholarship is a virtue, and placing what you did in the wider context is a very important part of pushing science forward (civilization could advance faster if people were more aware of other stuff out there—how many times have people reinvented graphical models?)
Signal to noise depends on the quality of the author—there are plenty of dense papers in academia, in all disciplines.
Clearly there’s a balance to be struck here: You want your posts to include everything that’s necessary for your audience to understand it, but no more. “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, as they say. And clearly, the more technical a post is, the greater the risk that it won’t be understood.
However, when it comes to your example of scientific papers, I definitely do feel that some academicians should be more concise! For economics papers, often about 80% of the paper is simply repetition of what other people wrote, sometimes solely to show that the author did their research. Maybe 5% is original input, and the rest is repetition (again, less so for technical papers). Philosophers tend to be even worse!
Scholarship is a virtue, and placing what you did in the wider context is a very important part of pushing science forward (civilization could advance faster if people were more aware of other stuff out there—how many times have people reinvented graphical models?)
Signal to noise depends on the quality of the author—there are plenty of dense papers in academia, in all disciplines.