Academics write for each other, not for people. Steven Pinker has spent over four decades doing the opposite, and thinks current academic writing is "enormous wasted effort." "There's an awful lot of brilliant work, really smart people in academia. Why are they doing it? Just to entertain each other?... Taxpayers pay for it. It should be accessible. Why should I have to read a paragraph five or six times? It gets under my skin when academics devote so much brainpower into the scholarship and then just blow off the essential task of letting the world know what you've done."show more

Of course they write for each other. They’re experts in specialized fields communicating complex new results to their colleagues. Should surgeons not write surgery protocols for other surgeons? Should nuclear engineers only write for the average person?

I think a lot of this comes from humanities and social science scholars wanting to give their work an impenetrability that puts it on the level of a physics or math paper. A way to deal with a chip on their shoulder.

I understand the sentiment but how are you supposed to engage complex ideas with a public that has a 4th grade reading level.

Honestly, what irritates me even more than “academics writing for each other” is the way the system prices everyone else out. I don’t want a 500‑word blog summary of a 10‑year‑old paper; I want to read the paper itself. But if you’re outside an institution, you routinely hit a $30–$40 paywall for a single PDF, which goes entirely to the publisher, not the author or the taxpayer who funded the work. I even broke down and bought my own copy of the Vienna Circle edition of Boltzmann’s later philosophical writings on steep 🤡 discount. It was still $109 instead of $200, and that’s for a decades‑old volume whose contents were already paid for many times over. Insane, but it was the only realistic way to have a copy I could hold, annotate, and actually use. If the point of scholarship is to expand the shared conceptual commons, then locking the work behind luxury pricing is at least as big a failure as writing in impenetrable prose.

god i hate these worst person you know made a great point moments

The way this posts suggests academics aren’t people makes me think the poster is either a terrible writer or malicious. Also: what Steven Pinker does is to write falsehoods in easily digestible prose akin to the rattling of a stick inside swill bucket.

academia has this weird gift for hiding useful work inside unreadable sentences

@_paullay Some would say Pinker writes too little for other academics. The point of doing that (and for students and the highly educated) is to compare and distil and reach better syntheses. Without that the needed books for a wider audience are going to be (already often are?) shallow.

Totally understand Pinker's concerns, but making academic writing "accessible" in most cases in simply impossible. Say, you have a 20-page paper on latest developments in LLMs. To make that paper "accessible" to non-specialists, it will become a tome of 1,500 pages because it will involve a lot of background details.

Lol, where would this leave math professors? As my partner, a McGill math grad, says, "most people are doing extremely well if they can understand the math up to 300 years ago." Imagine giving up the formulas and writing sound bites for this ponderous muffin.

I partly agree with Pinker. Science needs better public communication. But just as a cook cannot also serve tables in a restaurant, the scholar who prepares knowledge cannot easily become a public writer overnight, except in rare cases like Richard Feynman, Carl Sagan, or Hubert Reeves. Scholars must debate, refine, criticize, and falsify each other’s theories. This internal work is essential before knowledge can be responsibly shared with the public through others who often have to simplify it before communicating its findings.

I do find myself agreeing with Prof. Pinker here. It's frustrating when academics - especially now in the humanities - have basically pulled up the drawbridge. Instead of engaging with the wider world, they've retreated into their own little silos, arming themselves with dense jargon that no normal person can understand. What started as genuine scholarship has become a fancy gatekeeping game: if you can’t speak the latest theoretical gibberish, you're not welcome. Clarity is now viewed with suspicion, and accessibility feels almost like a betrayal. In the end, they're left guarding tiny intellectual fiefdoms, proudly mistaking obscurity for depth and isolation for sophistication.

1) Science requires an own language (formal, mathematically confined. 2) When scientific papers are published, they are not yet impactful. They reflect work, tiles, throughts. 3) There are many authors writing for the public.

(But aren't academics also... people?)

My philosophy and that of my mentor, Robert Nisbet. Like him I've tried to write my academic books in a style that any person who can read a major newspaper or magazine can access my work. Not always appreciated.

As a retired science writer I can tell you that knowing the audience is key. Unfortunately, due to our awful education system, it's often hard to know where to start. Do I have to define DNA? Stem cells? Gene therapy? The size of a virus? We have no science educated base line.

Why do those bloody surgeons and physicists write such impenetrable nonsense? They should dumb it down so the taxpayer understands it.

Follow the money. Academics write to other academics so they can get more grants. Government funded science has the wrong incentive mechanisms to be great science Great science is usually done by hobbyists

If he's looking to open up discussion and grant a little more access to the masses, it would be nice if he opened up his Tweets to responses. If he's worried about criticism or harassment, there's a handy feature in the brain called the "ignore" button.

Yeah but his writing wouldn't pass simple peer review, that's the cost of writing down. Moreover, the public doesn't even have an interest in our scientific writing aside from a few overinterpreted findings that the media picks up and bastardizes anyway.

Steven Pinker has written a lot of crap

Language is social; writing's no different. Like all groups, academics have their own in-group code words they use to barter status. But Pinker's right that researchers living off public funds should strive to provide more to the commons, and his books are a great model.

Don't see why you can't have both. That's why in science we have a category called public communication of science. If everything was understandable to the uninitiated, it would make publishing peer-reviewed research extremely difficult.

nobody—and I mean fucking NOBODY—has ever told a math professor that they needed to make their work "more accessible." scholarship is for specialists. fuck off with this shit

Well, Pinker’s a fucking idiot so YMMV

It's because literally the only reason they are academics is for status. The whole point is to exclude the unexceptional.

A regular person cannot ever, ever understand the Pythagoras theorem. Actually, less than 1 in 10 people understand that "a implies b" does not imply "b implies a", even in very practical, relevant scenarios. Imagine constraining scientists to write for them. Ridiculous.

It's because of cowardice. They gatekeep ideas with layers of jargon to avoid having to contend with confrontation.

Academia is so performative, rigid. If you are a creative, Academia will stifle you. As a creative, you should embrace academia's ability to enable you think but avoid its ability to limit your cognitive independence.

Pinker tends to take ideas with some value then exaggerate them until they are silly. This is a perfect example. He’s wrong in the exaggerated claim.

The amount of misinformation that pinker has spread is truly remarkable. We are a dumber society because of him

Actually - many washing machine instructions are written by engineers for engineers - end even though I have a PhD, I can often not follow what any of it means.

I think you need both, and probably in different channels - I'm reasonably sure most people don't need to know which buffer I used for my experiment, but might want to know what the experiment means for them. So companion pieces, lay abstracts, explainers are all important.

Nonsense.