[lapinot]

> Of the people who see your math paper, 90% will only read the title. Of those who read on, 90% will only read the abstract. Of those who go still further, 90% will read only the introduction, and then quit.

My personal experience is usually quite different. Perhaps i'm very weird but i like to think i'm nothing special. I mostly read papers when searching for something specific (referral by someone in a discussion, searching for a definition, a proof). I almost never read the introductions, at least not in my first pass. My first pass is usually scanning the outline to search which section will contain what i'm searching for and then reading that, jumping back and forth between definitions and theorems. I usually then read discussion/related work at the end, to read about what the authors think about their method, what they like or dislike in related papers.

Abstract and introduction i only read when i have done several such passes on a paper and i realize i am really interested in the thing and need to understand all the details.

I very much hate this "be catchy at the beginning" and its extremist instantiation "the quest for reader engagement". Sure you should pay attention to your prose and the story you're telling. But treating reader of a scientific paper as some busy consumer you should captivate is just disrespectful, scientifically unethical and probably just coping with current organizational problems (proliferation of papers, dilution of results, time pressure on reviewers and researchers). Scientific literature is technical, its quality should be measured by clarity and precision, ease of searching, ease of generalization, honesty about tradeoffs. Not by some engagement metric of a damned abstract.

[twelfthnight]

So, marketing is inevitable and necessary, but I have a hypothesis that the current Internet is making it worse. For example, creators (I'm lumping in researchers with songwriters, actors, etc) used to focus on passing the hurdle of getting an "elite" power (record company, publisher, University) to support them. Once over that hurdle, they specialized in creating and left marketing to the elite.

The elites would pressure the creators to do things they thought were marketable, but it didn't always work because creators had some leverage in negotiation and a small number of elites actually cared about making good stuff.

Now, there are fewer gatekeepers, but instead there is an all powerful algorithm. Creators all have to do their own marketing in addition to creating, and the algorithm can't be negotiated with.

So what we wind up with is insipid YouTube thumbnails and myriad academic papers with breathless "state of the art" claims.

There are tradeoffs, but I do think it's worth noticing how effectively we've started to reward creators for marketing rather than creating.