Comment by jeffparsons

Comment by jeffparsons 5 days ago

> My goal here is to develop an intuitive sense of comfort with the behaviors of these stacks. If I succeed, you will not just understand that the physics allows the stacks to be stable, but you will feel that it is proper and just.

I love this kind of writing. It feels like the author is excited to bring me along on a journey — not to show off how smart they are. In this way it reminds me of Turing's original paper that introduced his "computing machine". It presents a fantastically deep topic in a way that is not just remarkably accessible but also conversational and _friendly_.

I wonder why so little modern academic writing is like this. Maybe people are afraid it won't seem adequately professional unless their writing is sterile?

juancn 5 days ago

It's really hard to achieve. It takes an awful lot of work and being able to put yourself in the shoes of somebody who doesn't know everything you know.

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Retr0id 5 days ago

A lot of writing suffers from the problem of "this explanation only makes sense if you already understand it", and I think it's the default - if the author is essentially explaining the problem to themselves, of course it makes sense to someone who already understands it.
The problem can be perpetuated when e.g. a lecturer sets recommended reading to students. From the lecturer's perspective the selected reading material has clear explanations (because the lecturer understands the subject well), but the students do not feel the same way.
As you say, this takes effort to overcome, both on the author's side and from anyone trying to curate resources - including what we choose to upvote on HN!

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- f1shy 5 days ago
  
  Sadly many Universities have lots of professors who just copy books in the blackboard. Those books that asume you already know.
  
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  rtkwe 5 days ago
  
  Partially because Universities insist on making professors both teach and perform research (for the most part a few do have a real distinction between teaching and research but most still require at least a token class from most of their researchers) which isn't what most people go into a PhD program to do.
  
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f1shy 5 days ago

What helps is explaining it to many people, and carefully listening the questions asked by them. It of course help also to have a deeper understanding of the subject matter.

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cptroot 5 days ago

It is more likely that it is exceedingly difficult to write like this, even for simple topics like this balancing blocks problem. The further you get into an academic subfield, the less likely it is that you can even describe what you are pondering in plain English.

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