The tone and language of scholarly writing is way too opaque. In the name of being objective or formal (which researchers often find 'novel' and elegant ways to subvert), they successfully disconnect the reader from the authors' intuitions and sometimes all of their mental models.

Unfortunately, this is well-accepted and there are even tall proponents for this opaque writing style. The format gets transmitted to new researchers during their training period (PhD) — they are taught to distill their new ideas and hide their mental models with pompous formalism, in equal parts.

Thankfully, good research papers are often accompanied by blog posts these days. The latter forces the authors to tone down the formal writing style and appear more accessible. However, blog posts obviously are not regulated — they can choose to insert or omit key details at will.

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Inspired from Chris Molnar’s post:

Scientific papers are typically written in a very rigid and outcome-based way:• Focus is on the results.• Papers rarely contain the thought processes that guided the experiments.• Failed experiments are rarely published.• Code is rarely part of the paper.• Often algorithmic details are left out.• Mathiness and unnecessarily complex language favored over intuitive explanations

This outcome-based work encourages bad practices like p-hacking and hiding intuitive stuff behind equations.And it makes research much less accessible and relatable.

How much more fun it would be to read papers that are much more process-focused and authentic? Because not only would it be more fun, but also more useful.