I read a lot of academic papers. Most of them are poorly written. And I don’t mean over-use of jargon or words I don’t understand. These I don’t have a problem with. It’s what dictionaries and further reading are for.

What I mean is that academic culture seem to think that obscurity equals scholarship, when in actuality obscurantism means that no one understands your paper.

I’ve read I don’t know maybe a thousand scientific papers since I was 13 or so. Ninety-five percent of them I could revise to contain 98% of same technical content and make most of it completely comprehensible to a bright eighth-grader.

Why this is not done shows that culture is damaging in more areas than just racism and similar obviously-deleterious arenas.

If people weren’t idiots, Facebook wouldn’t exist.

We already did this. It was called “AOL.” Now Facebook is actively making my life worse because many businesses and other organizations have only Facebook pages. In every way, these pages are inferior to a website. They often lack crucial information, such as an address or phone number or operating hours.

Frequently, they are not accessible unless you sign in, which I will not do.

Dumb people: making things worse since ever.