Some (problematic) aesthetics of what constitutes good work in academia

Nice post, thanks ! 

I explains several elements that I find frustrating: science is supposed to provide useful knowledge we can use improve ourselves and the world, but wow, it's so hard to actually extract readily usable knowledge out of a bunch scientific papers, since so much is written in a form not adequate to the human brain.

I really like this article on the topic : 

Scientific production and communication cannot be seen as separate tasks: they are one and the same thing.

Science is, after all, a human enterprise and it has to be understood in human terms, otherwise it becomes a baroque accumulation of decorative items, just like gold in the paws of a dragon.
Henri Poincaré : "Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones. But an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house"

Executive summary: The aesthetics and incentives in academia can distort what work is considered "good", leading to an overemphasis on novelty, trendiness, and conspicuous effort at the expense of truth, importance, and clarity.

Key points:

1. The aesthetic of novelty/cleverness in psychology academia discourages publishing true, important insights about everyday life that are obvious in hindsight or have historical precedent.
2. The aesthetic of topicality/trendiness incentivizes researchers to work on currently popular topics and use trendy terminology, rather than the most important problems.
3. The aesthetic of effort leads to valuing conspicuous displays of technical difficulty over concise, helpful explanations.
4. These problematic aesthetics are not unique to academia, and are often invisible to those most affected by them.
5. Having bad aesthetics of success leads to having bad "research taste" that optimizes for the wrong things.
6. We should examine what aesthetics we use to judge success in our own pursuits, and what distortions they might cause.

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