I'm sorry that you have not encountered much good scientific writing. I am delighted to report that there is a lot of good writing in computer science and linguistics, which I know well. When I started in the 1980s, there was a fair bit of less good writing by authors writing in their second language. But even with a hugely increased number of papers that we have today, and the resulting pressure to publish fast, this difference is mostly gone,
I'm curious if the decline in science writing, especially recently, has been related to the decline in the importance of humanities and overall rounded education for scientists?
Seems like back in the day to be a scientist you had to be a real renaissance man, or at least know your way around literature and poetry. Most scientists nowadays just kind of snooze through a psych 101 class and call it a day to get the credit, I would imagine. Overall universities produce far less well rounded people.
I'll admit to the fact that modern humanities programs... don't exactly inspire confidence that they're producing well read graduates either though.
> The way that we write is inseparable from the way that we think, and restrictions in one necessarily lead to restrictions in the other.
I have two problems with this sentence. The first is that it is false, and the second is that you bolded it.
My oldest child is dyslexic, and writes only with difficulty and discomfort. But once every week or so this person approaches me with a "You know, I was thinking" that surpasses the level of insight I encounter on most blog posts.
It isn't that I'm trying to be dismissive here; this subject is something I've turned around in my mind for a long time. I'm told that, as a child of around seven, I asked my mother, "How can [our pet rabbit] think without language?" I was only seven, right, so I was a bit slow to realize the question wasn't very sensible. When you perform a mental rotation in your head, or ride a bicycle, are you thinking about it out loud? For me solutions to problems in math and physics simply come to mind, and I only mutter about them after the fact.
I think this is (part of) why politics is so awful: people reach conclusions nonverbally, and then make up stories about how their thought processes came together after the fact. One of the best scales for measuring conservatism is the Wilson-Patterson: it gives subjects a phrase like "computer music" and the option to immediately answer "yes" "?" or "no." This scale correlates r > 0.7 with Altemeyer's bloated RWA scale which is full of questions like "Once our government leaders give us the go ahead, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within." Are you sure what's going on here is significantly different from somebody saying "research style" and your clicking "yes" over and over again?
I'm sorry that you have not encountered much good scientific writing. I am delighted to report that there is a lot of good writing in computer science and linguistics, which I know well. When I started in the 1980s, there was a fair bit of less good writing by authors writing in their second language. But even with a hugely increased number of papers that we have today, and the resulting pressure to publish fast, this difference is mostly gone,
I'm curious if the decline in science writing, especially recently, has been related to the decline in the importance of humanities and overall rounded education for scientists?
Seems like back in the day to be a scientist you had to be a real renaissance man, or at least know your way around literature and poetry. Most scientists nowadays just kind of snooze through a psych 101 class and call it a day to get the credit, I would imagine. Overall universities produce far less well rounded people.
I'll admit to the fact that modern humanities programs... don't exactly inspire confidence that they're producing well read graduates either though.
> The way that we write is inseparable from the way that we think, and restrictions in one necessarily lead to restrictions in the other.
I have two problems with this sentence. The first is that it is false, and the second is that you bolded it.
My oldest child is dyslexic, and writes only with difficulty and discomfort. But once every week or so this person approaches me with a "You know, I was thinking" that surpasses the level of insight I encounter on most blog posts.
It isn't that I'm trying to be dismissive here; this subject is something I've turned around in my mind for a long time. I'm told that, as a child of around seven, I asked my mother, "How can [our pet rabbit] think without language?" I was only seven, right, so I was a bit slow to realize the question wasn't very sensible. When you perform a mental rotation in your head, or ride a bicycle, are you thinking about it out loud? For me solutions to problems in math and physics simply come to mind, and I only mutter about them after the fact.
I think this is (part of) why politics is so awful: people reach conclusions nonverbally, and then make up stories about how their thought processes came together after the fact. One of the best scales for measuring conservatism is the Wilson-Patterson: it gives subjects a phrase like "computer music" and the option to immediately answer "yes" "?" or "no." This scale correlates r > 0.7 with Altemeyer's bloated RWA scale which is full of questions like "Once our government leaders give us the go ahead, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within." Are you sure what's going on here is significantly different from somebody saying "research style" and your clicking "yes" over and over again?