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by abecedarius 1701 days ago
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.abe4932

This does a considerably better job of context/interest than the math example did.

1 comments

It's a lot easier when all you have to do is say stuff like "heart failure is bad".

What's the mathematician supposed to do, say "group theory is cool and important"?

The thing is, mathematicians understand how cool and important it is, and that's enough. You can't really explain it to someone else -- it's like trying to explain how cool and important a piece of music is to a deaf person who doesn't know music. They see the conductor waving and say "well, that's boring." All you can do is explain "there is a whole world of beauty and meaning there. I'm sorry you can't experience it, but it's there."
The "Mathematics is Boring" author is a mathematician who seems really enthusiastic about math. He's not asking here for mathematicians to punch up their papers for nonmathematicians; he's asking them to give a bit better context for all the other mathematicians beyond the dozen others in the same sub-sub-subspecialty.

This Science paper's intro/abstract sets it out for scientists, rather than for biologists in whatever subspecialty this thing is.