> security groups also have a vested interest in making their findings sound complex
Security person here. I always feel that way when reading published papers written by professional scientists, which seem like they can often (especially in computer science, but maybe that's because it's my field and I understand exactly what they're doing and how they got there) be more accessible as a blog post of half the length and a fifth of the complex language. Not all of them, of course, but probably a majority of papers. Not only aren't they optimising for broad audiences (that's fine because that's not their goal) but that it's actively trying to gatekeep by defining useless acronyms and stretching the meaning of jargon just so they can use it
I guess it'll feel that way to anyone who's not familiar with the terms, and we automatically fall for the trap of copying the standards of the field? In school we were definitely copied from each other what the most sophisticated way of writing was during group projects because the teachers clearly cared about it (I didn't experience that at all before doing a master's, at least not outside of language or "how to write a good CV" classes). And this became the standard because the first person in the field had to prove it's a legit new field maybe?
Security person here. I always feel that way when reading published papers written by professional scientists, which seem like they can often (especially in computer science, but maybe that's because it's my field and I understand exactly what they're doing and how they got there) be more accessible as a blog post of half the length and a fifth of the complex language. Not all of them, of course, but probably a majority of papers. Not only aren't they optimising for broad audiences (that's fine because that's not their goal) but that it's actively trying to gatekeep by defining useless acronyms and stretching the meaning of jargon just so they can use it
I guess it'll feel that way to anyone who's not familiar with the terms, and we automatically fall for the trap of copying the standards of the field? In school we were definitely copied from each other what the most sophisticated way of writing was during group projects because the teachers clearly cared about it (I didn't experience that at all before doing a master's, at least not outside of language or "how to write a good CV" classes). And this became the standard because the first person in the field had to prove it's a legit new field maybe?