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.