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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

Papers are written to peers. It shouldn't be a "murder mystery" for them (that doesn't mean it shouldn't tell a story). You have to write to your audience. If a paper was written to a general audience, instead of peers, every paper would have to be a novel.

I'll admit that sometimes I'm frustrated with HN comments on arxiv articles. Despite being a nerdy forum most papers aren't written for this audience. Hell, I have a PhD and most papers aren't written for me. Nor should they. I'm perfectly okay if I don't understand a paper. Arguably the hardest thing about a PhD is learning to be comfortable with being dumb and willing to work on becoming less dumb (you're never not dumb, only less dumb)

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That's true, but I think scientific writing often veers too hard towards impenetrability. At least in machine learning, many of the hallmark papers are remarkably clear and simple in a way that most papers I read day-to-day aren't. Even something as simple as the problem setting can be written insightfully in a strong piece of work.

  > At least in machine learning

You should read math papers lol.

Honestly, I feel the opposite. But maybe that's because my doctorate is in ML. But we might also have a different definition of what the hallmark papers are. Many of the well known papers are ones that model scaled an existing method (ViT and ddpm are good examples). Important papers, but in which sense? I do think we have space for all types of papers and written to different audiences, but I don't think we should punish papers just because they're written to their niche domain. In the past decade there's been a huge increase in citation farming and I don't think that helps. Math is probably too much on one extreme but I think ML is on the other. You have to write your papers so a first year PhD can understand, because they're the ones reviewing your work. I don't think that's a desirable outcome

I feel that this partly due to the fact the these famous/groundbreaking papers will usually be explained to you in many other places before you even read it. So you probably get good understanding of it even before reading the actual paper.

For example, the papers where Einstein presented special relativity suck really but most of people know about it with goor grasp before reading the actual papers (People of that era).

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