This is a special post for quick takes by Raemon. Only they can create top-level comments. Comments here also appear on the Quick Takes page and All Posts page.
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
don't feel ready to be written up as a full post
I think the process of writing them up might make them worse (i.e. longer than they need to be)
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.
I notice that academic papers have stupidly long, hard-to-read abstracts. My understanding is that this is because there is some kind of norm about papers having the abstract be one paragraph, while the word-count limit tends to be... much longer than a paragraph (250 - 500 words).
Can... can we just fix this? Can we either say "your abstract needs to be a goddamn paragraph, which is like 100 words", or "the abstract is a cover letter that should be about one page long, and it can have multiple linebreaks and it's fine."
(My guess is that the best equilibrium is "People keep doing the thing currently-called-abstracts, and start treating them as 'has to fit on one page', with paragraph breaks, and then also people start writing a 2-3 sentence thing that's more like "the single actual-paragraph that you'd read if you were skimming through a list of papers.")
I do think, like, man, I wanted to know about primatology, and it seems pretty silly to assume that science should only be relevant to specialists in a field. Especially when the solution is literally just inserting two paragraph breaks.
(I might also make claims that academic papers should be doing more effortful things to be legible, but this just seemed like a fairly straightforward thing that was more of an obviously-bad-equilibrium than a "there's a big effortful thing I think other people should do for other-other-people's benefit.")
This is an experiment in short-form content on LW2.0. I'll be using the comment section of this post as a repository of short, sometimes-half-baked posts that either:
I ask people not to create top-level comments here, but feel free to reply to comments like you would a FB post.