[jrsala]

I think the author simply uses the vocabulary of his field, and he tries to communicate effectively with it. As a consequence, his language is terse and full of references to concepts that are foreign to a run-of-the-mill SWE like me ("naturalization", "symbol grounding", "intentional-referential behavior").

Effectiveness of communication is relative, of course, and what is appropriate for an audience may not be appropriate for another. A parallel with programming languages can be drawn here: mainstream language programmers often have a knee-jerk reaction to being told "look, in Haskell, this program that took you 80 lines in your favorite OOP language is just 4 lines of almost only special characters that look like I banged my head on the keyboard!" but it's just a matter of easing into a different language and different concepts.

[fauigerzigerk]

I don't disagree with you in principle, but I read a lot of papers from fields I'm not sufficiently familiar with and I know what that is like.

I also know from my own field that some people like to write for effect rather than effectiveness.

[jrsala]

I see where you're coming from. I sometimes get that feeling too. The way I approach this is by asking myself if the author could have expressed their ideas with simpler words or if some meaning would have been lost had they tried to simplify. Could I have reformulated anything without loss and without paraphrasing or resorting to examples?

It's like Dijkstra's famous quote: "The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague, but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise". Did the author need to invoke these abstract concepts and complicated wordings to be absolutely precise or did they throw around abstractions in over-engineered sentences to make themselves look intelligent?

Since I can't claim to understand the topic and the author's message fully, I can't be certain it's one or the other. All I have is a subjective feeling, but I think the author was trying to be precise and that each word had its genuine place at least in the author's point of view.

For example, when I read the last sentence of the introduction "following Hutto & Myin’s solution that real-world content depends on shared scaffolded practices that augment basic agents, we explore socially situated computing as an approach to naturalizing information content in computing", my internal bullshit alarm was ringing pretty loud, but it turns out each of the concepts gets expanded upon in the rest of the text.

I think overall this text was a challenging read but one benefit of it beyond the author's message is that I learned of the existence of this topic and line of thought in the first place, and it certainly piqued my curiosity.

[fauigerzigerk]

It's absolutely possible that you are right and I'm not doing him justice.