[the_stc]

As a general comment, I dislike deliberately obtuse writing in papers. In my current work, I came across a very in-depth survey of our industry (sex work). Excellent study, very helpful. But some of the sentences seemed to over-complicate the math. Example: "Consider the set P {p1, p2, ... pN} representing providers and the set C {c1, c2, ... cN} representing customers". I am pretty sure this kind of stuff is filler or pretends to make things look more rigorous than they are.

On the other hand, maybe spending more than a line explaining what the birthday paradox is should be cut out and put in a backgrounder paper or appendix so that the paper can focus on the actual novel ideas.

[dsacco]

> On the other hand, maybe spending more than a line explaining what the birthday paradox is should be cut out and put in a backgrounder paper or appendix so that the paper can focus on the actual novel ideas.

That was my annoyance with the paper as well. Add to that explanations that amount to, "What even is determinism?" or "What's a seed?" and I'm unsurprised it's nearly 60 pages.

[mathperson]

are you joking? That is your example of abstruse mathematical notation? Some variables with names?!

[the_stc]

No. I am saying that giving the definition of a set each time is just extra verbosity. The whole paper had that extra verbiage, everywhere. Kind of why-use-one-word-when-ten-will-do feeling.

[mathperson]

Could you share the paper? I mean if they were making a mathematical argument...it is kind of hard to do that without defining things..

[greggyb]

"Consider the set P {p1, p2, ... pN} representing providers and the set c {c1, c2, ... cN} representing customers"

versus

"Consider the set P of providers and the set C of customers"

The former is about 2x the length of the latter. This is the verbosity I read into the original comment.

[thaumasiotes]

The first is required when you want to later refer to an individual element from the set.

"Consider the set P of providers" means when you eventually refer to p_2, you'll have to note that you mean an element (the second, in some sense) of P. That moved the verbosity around rather than eliminating it.

To me it seems like a much bigger error that "Consider the set P {p_1, p_2, ... p_N} representing providers and the set c {c_1, c_2, ... c_N} representing customers" states outright that the sets are equal in size. I would expect C to be much larger than P.

[greggyb]

If this is a commonly used notation in the paper, then it would make sense to state once up front "here's how we refer to sets and their members". DRY and all that.

[mathperson]

mmm I see.