> The fact that he, Srivastava and Spielman were able to solve it “says something about what I hope will be the future of mathematics,” he said. When mathematicians import ideas across fields, “that’s when I think these really interesting jumps in knowledge happen.”
So much yes.
Academia is hyper-focused, over specializing everywhere. There is little incentive to spending time making one's work understandable to a wider audience. I would argue that this is actually dis-incentivised as the downside to "making it look easy" is very bad indeed. But it's worse than this: the typical academic seems to have little ability to even explain their work to others within the same micro-field. Once again, the emphasis is on making it look as complicated as possible, in the interests of securing prestige (and funding).
> There is little incentive to spending time making one's work understandable to a wider audience.
I wonder if there's a way to create incentive here? Or perhaps even a need to fill for the academics who are poor at explaining their work? Maybe some kind of layman's explanation service for technical papers with the authors' hope that by better explaining their research, they might be able to gain a wider audience or be more often referenced?
So much yes.
Academia is hyper-focused, over specializing everywhere. There is little incentive to spending time making one's work understandable to a wider audience. I would argue that this is actually dis-incentivised as the downside to "making it look easy" is very bad indeed. But it's worse than this: the typical academic seems to have little ability to even explain their work to others within the same micro-field. Once again, the emphasis is on making it look as complicated as possible, in the interests of securing prestige (and funding).