Interestingly enough, when I have found research papers on the subject that I am looking at, most are so opaque that it was not worth reading in the first place. More helpful information has been presented by others who you would classify as tinkerers. They have been clearer in their explanations and much easier to build upon.

In the sense of presenting the research in a manner that other people can digest, academia seems to be more of a ancient guild than an organisation for expanding knowledge.

Academic papers are written for an audience of experts. If you wish to understand them, you’ll need to be an expert in the field (you can sometimes get away with a bit less, depending on the topic). They are not intended for general dissemination.

>Academic papers are written for an audience of experts.

You and parent are saying the same thing. Just because they are written for experts does not mean they are not written in an opaque manner.

And as someone who was once in academia, they really are written for 2 reasons:

1. To get past the peer review process.

2. To be written in the minimal time possible.

Enlightening peers comes a distant 3rd.

Example: It took days for a grad student/professor to derive a formula that is included in the paper.

Professor insists the derivation not be included in the paper. Insists the student not even mention in a few sentences the steps to get to it. Claims "any expert should be able to do this. No need to add it to the paper."

It took that expert days to do it. Unless it turns out to be a seminal paper, I guarantee that in most cases, no reader of the paper will even try. An error in the derivation? No one would catch it. Clearly, the professor is not even writing for his peers.

I do agree with the parent - the practices approach that of a guild more than any objective measure of explaining things.

One could also argue its a lack of distillation. Yes, an expert in field could/should understand, but does that mean it should be accepted that the papers are inaccessible to without same or greater level of expertise? Even experts struggle with opaque nature of many papers. Not saying that they should be dumbed down or using less precise language in order to appeal to wider audience, but more than a little more effort could increase value to all.

https://distill.pub/2017/research-debt/

Yes, if you cannot follow review papers you need to read up some more. (Look for review papers if you're new to the area.)

Sure, where do I get review papers without having an affiliation with an academic institution?

Scihub has made virtually all academic papers freely accessible.

Use Google Scholar. Most technical researchers these days put all their papers on their webpage for free, and these days also on ArXiv.

Write an email to the author and ask for a PDF, plus what the sibling comments say.

make a request on the scholar subreddit

Excellent article btw.

You say there's nothing wrong with tinkering but it's a fairly derogatory word. From dictionary.com [0], it's specified as:

> an unskillful or clumsy worker; bungler.

Certainly here in HN and in computing in general, the term hacker might be more fitting.

[0]: http://www.dictionary.com/browse/tinkering

Good point, I could have used "hacker" instead, though that's more specific to writing software. I didn't perceive "tinkerer" as a word with negative connotations when I wrote it.

Come to think of it, many outside the hacker community would perceive "hacker" more negatively than "tinkerer", because many people still think of hackers as criminal. At least that's my perception. I guess words have different values in different contexts.

Although modern usage of the word “hacker” has been applied to non-software contexts, I’ve also seen the term “maker” used here as well.

"wiki" usually means "wikipedia". A 20s DuckDuckGo search leads to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science

> Science (from Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge")[2][3]:58 is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe.[a]

Incidentally, the "wiki" as a system separates "scholarship" from "authoring". "scholarship" is done collaboratively post factum, given substance "authored" by various overlapping sources.