Marginalium

Academic writing is getting harder to read:

The Economist analysed 347,000 PhD abstracts published between 1812 and 2023 … a majority of English-language doctoral theses awarded by British universities … in every discipline, the abstracts have become harder to read over the past 80 years. The shift is most stark in the humanities and social sciences

A function of increasing specialisation, almost certainly—even the articles I wrote to explain my PhD are hard to read (and were harder to write). What is particularly curious to me, in psychology anyway, is that despite this increasing specialisation, we have not progressed much since the early 20th Century. Read William James on attention, and read attention literature, and you will not really learn anything new except perhaps that various brain things correlate with whatever James reckoned might be happening. So this isn’t just specialisation. it’s also a function of increasingly reified institutional ways of doing things that hides the fact that little new is being discovered behind different and more complicated words.