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My PhD advisor said something similar, but he also said papers tell a story. There are a lot of stories that aren't murder mysteries nor suspense novels. Your paper shouldn't be a novel and especially not a suspense one

by Joker_vD5 hours ago|

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Heh. Mine, before the diploma defense, literally told me "Assume that the panel knows everything about the math except for the stuff your did in your thesis, so tell them about that. Don't bother explaining what 'error correction codes' are, tell them about your specific construction and practical boundaries you've determined". Which, I guess, is precisely "the reader knows everything I know except this one thing" antipattern but then again, blogging is different from e.g. conference presentation, isn't it?

by godelski19 minutes ago|

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Papers are written to peers. It shouldn't be a "murder mystery" for them (that doesn't mean it shouldn't tell a story). You have to write to your audience. If a paper was written to a general audience, instead of peers, every paper would have to be a novel.

I'll admit that sometimes I'm frustrated with HN comments on arxiv articles. Despite being a nerdy forum most papers aren't written for this audience. Hell, I have a PhD and most papers aren't written for me. Nor should they. I'm perfectly okay if I don't understand a paper. Arguably the hardest thing about a PhD is learning to be comfortable with being dumb and willing to work on becoming less dumb (you're never not dumb, only less dumb)

by DonaldPShimoda5 hours ago|

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Yeah, deciding on your assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge is one of the toughest parts of presenting information well, I think. If you give too much info, you come across as boring or patronizing; if you don't give enough info, most (if not all) of your audience will rapidly lose interest. But it's all gotta be based on your exact audience in the moment, and that's really hard to take into account a lot of the time.

by Terr_4 hours ago|

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> Yeah, deciding on your assumptions about the audience's prior knowledge is one of the toughest parts of presenting information well, I think.

Right, all good (human) communication boils down to both the author and the reader having a theory-of-mind for one-another. The writer must anticipate what a reader will be thinking, and a reader must imagine [0] what the writer wanted to convey.

That's part of what makes the modern epidemic of LLM slop so frustrating: The correctly-formed words make us waste effort trying to reconstruct a mind that was never really there. Like some animals encountering an extremely realistic plastic fake that we cannot eat/mate-with.

by DonaldPShimoda2 hours ago|

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Ooh yes, I like that way of framing the problem. I'll have to remember that!

by 5 hours ago|

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by mrweasel5 hours ago|

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I was handed the paper: A rational design process, how and why to fake it [0]. It's still one of my favorit papers. Basically it tells you to, when writing documentation, go back and put in later findings in the place it would been, if the world had been completely rational. Just leave out all the weaving and late discovery, very few people cares. Retrofit documentation to pretend that everything and everyone was completely rational and had all the knowledge at the correct times. It can cut down documents by a lot.

0) https://users.ece.utexas.edu/~perry/education/SE-Intro/fakei...