[spb]

The worst trait I see when domain experts try to write "introductory" material is a depressingly-common amnesia toward what it was like to not already know their subject matter. This article is so badly written, so overly and needlessly wordy, that I'm honestly considering deconstructing it line-by-line as a case study in how not to write articles for the layman.

Here's a brief example, using the most jarring line I've been derailed by so far (I still haven't finished reading this article, getting hung up on runs like this):

> So what is the purpose of lateral inhibition in the retina? Let’s consider what kind of stimuli are optimal for activating this bipolar cell.

"What is the purpose of lateral inhibition in the retina?" Uh, hi - I just got here. We are zero lines from the place where we were first introduced to any of these terms (the last two words of the preceding illustration's detail are literally the first place the phrase "lateral inhibition" even appears).

We've just been shown this concept, at all, for the first time - in a literally microscopic illustration, with some concepts so unexplained they were just left for us to hunt for ("Notice that a single neuron pools information" - notice what? Notice how?) - and now we're supposed to be considering the ultimate purpose for this obliquely-introduced phenomenon? Not only that - we're supposed to be pondering this now using a neurologist's lexicon?

If we were actually supposed to be following what the author is saying here, we'd be given some time to reiterate this concept we were just presented from one angle, to consider it in different approaches, with descriptions we don't immediately understand reinforcing a model we could build with other descriptions we could better understand.

Instead of reinforcing its subject, the article spends time on aside paragraphs mocking what a non-neurological model of human vision might be (talking about Dennett's Cartesian Theatre), despite the way that nobody reading this would have that misconception, and introducing it only adds a concept so unrelated that it actively impedes understanding of the material. Passages like this are just thrown in, like the author wants to say "I know more than you, and I want you to know that I don't just know neurology, I also took a philosophy course."

The line I excerpted doesn't even have to spend more time describing the concept. Indeed - it's actually more effective if you make it less wordy, because a high-level general description tells us which things we don't strictly have to understand to follow the next part. Here's how I'd write that whole paragraph - note how much less I hang meaning on unexplained jargon:

> So, when a wide area of photoreceptors see the same signal, they actually reduce the signal seen by the tight cluster in the center. Why reduce the signal like this? Because this way, when we see a small detail - one that isn't surrounded by a big area of the same kind of light - that wider group of photoreceptors (connected to the horizontal cell) doesn't inhibit the signal. Getting stronger signals for just the smaller details is what makes stuff like dots and edges visually obvious to our human eyes.

It's not perfectly clear - it still needs a round or two of editing to be truly smooth to read - but, even as a rough draft, that's smoother than anything in the linked publication, which reads like didactic sandpaper.

[neurosphere]

Bit of a harsh critique, though I appreciate reading people's comments on my writing. Ultimately, doing some writing over the past few months has taught me that I shouldn't necessarily underestimate people's ability to understand scientific concepts if only I take the time to explain them properly. I'm sorry that what I wrote wasn't sufficiently comprehensible :-( Also, I never took a philosophy class. None of what I said was meant to be pretentious or superior - I was just putting out there some concepts I found interesting.

[spb]

Yeah, don't take it personally. Most of what I wrote there was just pent-up generalized frustration with a lot of published material out there. I regret not sufficiently framing my post within that context.

The authors I really want to hit with this kind of critique are the ones who aren't embracing what you describe here:

> Ultimately, doing some writing over the past few months has taught me that I shouldn't necessarily underestimate people's ability to understand scientific concepts if only I take the time to explain them properly.

There's a troublingly large contingent out there that, as XKCD put it, [communicates badly and then acts smug when it's misunderstood][1], [confused about how communication works][2]. These are the ones I really take issue with: the ones who are pleased when the audience who can absorb their material is small, interpreting it as validation of their own abilities (thinking "I'm one of a few people who can understand this"), instead of a refutation of them.

[1]: https://xkcd.com/169/

[2]: https://xkcd.com/1028/ "Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works."

I particularly apologize for the part about it being pretentious to mention the Cartesian Theatre. While I would cut that in later drafts for being irrelevant (which, like all irrelevant material, confuses the subject), it really doesn't come across as anything more than that, and I was especially projecting my frustrations from other stuff I've read when I characterized it like that.

[ars]

If it helps, I had zero prior knowledge of "lateral inhibition in the retina" and I had no problem at all understanding the writing.

[posterboy]

That the writing is subjective and hence too colorful and wordy is evidenced by the remark, "what I find most interesting about them".

Edit: It is however not as long as I derided in another comment. At least there is a link to a relevant paper in the beginning, although further reading didn't appeal to reading that paper. The text is almost half as long as the paper, that's too long for a summary. I'll refrain from more critique as I'm far from an expert on literature.

Your comment is ironically very wordy as well, but I concur.

Edit2: I am not seeing sources for the images.