[pen2l]

I have a mathematician friend who studied mathematics at MIT and then worked in a research team at Google for some time. I caught up with him, and casually half-jokingly told him that I tried to understand some of his papers but I got nothing out of them.

And he replied, in earnest, that some of the papers are needlessly and deliberately complicated and obfuscated for a whole host of reasons (political reasons, career reasons etc).

This jargon-heavy circumlocutious academic speak you find often in papers, it's a gate-barrier... to keep out non-native English speakers, up-and-coming scholars? I don't know, but whatever the case, let's hope the outflow of papers written with LLM assistance takes a blow at the problem, when the corpus of literature is so diluted with all this that corporate-speak and jargon-heavy speak as a differentiator for in-group or whatever has a lesser incentive to exist.

https://paulgraham.com/simply.html

[bee_rider]

Academic language can be a bit jargony and tedious. But also, academics are people too. Is it at all possible that your friend was writing with an assumed audience of other experts and wanted to mitigate the extent to which your inability to get anything from the papers made you feel bad?

[nick3443]

Ironically, one of the things llms are actually decent at is helping remove jargon and summarize text

[Sateeshm]

It's a hit or a miss. In my experience, when they summarise they struggle to understand nuances and group things that seem similar in nature but really aren't.

[pishpash]

Certainly Gemini for Google suites has been useless so far.