Hacker News Reader

Comment by superposeur | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for this clear account. This proves that it is possible (at least occasionally) to describe a chemistry project using ordinary language to a non-chemist.

By contrast, every single chemistry poster session or talk seems instead to consist of inscrutable walls of long technical terms and impossibly convoluted flow charts. I’ve often wondered whether this really all makes perfect sense to chemists themselves? Like, if I were to surreptitiously change one syllable out of a 10-syllable word, or reverse a couple of the arrows on a flow chart, would anyone in the audience notice? If not, then why is the information being conveyed in this way, seemingly without any effort at comprehensibility?

Edit: don’t mean to condescend to chemists. The question is a genuine one. Does it really have to be so inaccessible from start to finish? Maybe yes is the answer, that’s the nature of the thing. Physics is not like that, for instance.

View on HN

Would you prefer CS algorithms in papers to be written in English prose rather than pseudo code? Would you notice if your neural network diagram has its arrows reversed? I do not understand HN's superiority complex when it comes to notation. Every thread on music in this forum devolves to complaints about music notation rather than the essence of the art itself. It is disappointing.

To be clear, despite the slightly snarky tone, I don’t mean to condescend to chemists! Quite the opposite, this is borne out of disappointment when I listen to a whole chem presentation and fail to grasp even one simple idea. I’m a physicist, btw, and could easily fill a presentation with inscrutable equations but what would be the point of that? Instead I make sure that everyone (even a scientifically literate layperson) can stay on board at least the first third of the presentation.

I guess it's alway a question of what audience you speak to. OPs explanation could probably be summarized in 2 sentences when aimed at chemists.

As someone who sits on the bounds of a lot of fields, I have to say it is surprising what many scientists think are "common knowledge." So having never seen your presentation I would question whether it is even a scientific literate layperson would actually be able to follow.

I distinctly remember being in a room of biologists and having to explain that, your general STEM audience does not automatically know what a protein is. They were incredulous, but I pointed out that I had to just explain that to a computer scientist like a week prior.

For example to you as a physicist I'm sure I could casually drop the word "force field" and you would know exactly what I'm discussing but a biologist or even chemist wouldn't. But it's such a casually thrown around word in my specialty we will just use it without thinking. Similarly Newtonian physics/classical physics/etc.

https://xkcd.com/2501/ (Average Familiarity) is very funny, in part because it is 100% real.

> whether this really all makes perfect sense to chemists themselves?

Yes. Obviously! Someone working in a technical field will understand the jargon and notation of that field.

Certainly if you are working in (say) physical chemistry, you might not be familiar with all the terminolgy of (say) organometallic chemistry, or vice versa.

The question of whether the audience might 'notice' is more tricky, but still bizarre. Certainly, changing (say) one part of a long chemical name might escape attention, but so what?

For example, one catalyst due to the prize winners is :

(5S)-2,2,3-trimethyl-5-phenylmethyl-4-imidazolidinone

if I swapped the '2,2,3-trimethyl' and the '5-phenylmethyl' parts of this, it would be likely non-standard nomenclature, and maybe someone might notice. However the information conveyed would be the same.

Ok then! Truly impressive that chemists carry around such a store of jargon.

Well at least they've moved on from the days of alchemy where the tendency was to make up your own notation and jargon to obscure what you actually did :)

It might help to know these names are formed systematically.

URIs can also look inscrutable, but make more sense once you know how to break them down into scheme://user@host:port/path

Chemical names (mostly) work the same way. There are a fair number of rules and concepts, but once you understand them, the endless names map onto structures pretty cleanly[0]. Here are some of them: http://www.chem.uiuc.edu/GenChemReferences/nomenclature_rule...

[0] Mostly. There are some historical exceptions. Acetone should be called something like 2-propanone, for example, but...it isn't.

Most common chemicals are exceptions to IUPAC naming.

I have similar problems in my own field where an academic could EASILY explain the core of a problem in a few bullet points, but instead will try to cram 20 lines of dense mathematical formulation in size 8 font on a slide. It is just bad communication. That should be left in the white paper, sure, but not at a conference where 3/4 the room just starts reading email. I try to explain this to academics all the time when they're trying to communicate with industry, but few seem to get it.

Keep in mind, I'm not saying that's the same as what we're talking about in this post, but I thought you'd be interested in the personal anecdote. Clear communication is an art that takes years to master. Unfortunately, a lot of academic papers are not meant for a general audience or even an audience of non academic experts.

Yes that’s a good point, clear communication is hard in any field. I want to say to everyone, at least make an effort, though, please?

I share a similar skepticism of people the obfuscate the information with jargon.

Any technical field will have its jargon, but the general concept can also (almost always) be explained in a more accessible way (like the hn comment and the article's introduction do).

I've found people that rely on jargon exclusively sometimes don't actually understand the underlying concepts when you ask them questions that dig into it. It's one of the flags that someone is full of shit. Sometimes it's just targeting a narrow audience.

The space on posters is extremely limited. You condense several person-months into a few sentences and graphics, usually fewer words than OP used.

At the same time, the research is usually very narrow. It's hard but possible to convey a general concept in few words, but if you study the properties of a subclass of a subclass of a subclass of a subclass of organic chemicals, you simply have to use terms of art. You don't have the space to explain what a ligand is, or what paramagnetism is, and you don't need to anyway, because your audience likely understands the concepts better than you do.

I think that makes total sense for a poster.

It's when talking to people that I've noticed a difference. Some people have the jargon, but I can ask questions and learn from them because they can explain the underlying ideas.

Some just hide behind the jargon and can't answer questions - often in the latter the impression I get is that their actual knowledge is pretty shallow. It's not always the case (sometimes people are just bad at communication in general), but it's the case often enough that it's a signal.

It's also something I've noticed more in academia for whatever reason. My off the cuff guess is that both some cultural pressure towards signaling intelligence and prestige is coupled with being hard to understand, and that it's easier to hide with bullshit in academia than in industry. Not that you can't hide in industry too, but entire fields of academia that were total bullshit sometimes perpetuate for decades - companies typically die earlier than that.

Its not that they can't be explained more accessibly, its that they shouldn't.

When you talk to other practitioners its more important to be precise and succint than it is to be accessible. Just like the opposite is true when talking to the general public. Different audiences have different needs.

Some people do use excessive jargon to sound "smart" (and they are annoying). Anyone who knows what they are doing should be able to communicate in either mode depending on what the situation demands. Just because some people abuse jargon doesn't mean it doesn't have a valid place.

Yeah - I think we're in agreement.

Yes. Yes they would. Don't make snap judgments about fields you lack competence in.

Don’t intend to make snap judgment (despite my unfortunate tone) — the question is a genuine one. Does it really have to be so inaccessible from start to finish? Maybe yes is the answer, that’s the nature of the thing. Physics is not like that, for instance.

I think its the nature of the thing. Some fields are easy to 'big picture' - like physics (apart from quantum-level?) or biology. If they relate to everyday experience then that is surely easier.

Chemistry often deals with the everyday, of course - drugs, paint,fuels, cooking even. However it can also deal with very obscure reactions where the details are entirely technical.

For example, there are whole papers dedicated to "this is the detailed series of steps we found to make this obscure chemical (X) that is difficult to make". That could be summarised as just "we made X!" - not super interesting, by itself...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com