1. In academia, you need to be exact. You can't use vernacular words with many interpretations. You need to describe as precisely as possible your hypothesis, the methods you used to test it, and your results. Jargon avoids ambiguity.
2. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate it to general audiences. It's to describe, in detail, a study you performed so that others can attempt to reproduce it. The audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the same field. Communication of the results to a general audience is another matter.
I think the quote implies that Feynman's suggested changes were for marketing materials. It turns out myself and my colleagues were the intended targets of those marketing materials. We ignored them and just benchmarked the system.
In the end none of it mattered because it was next to impossible to achieve significant fractions of the quoted "peak" performance for real world/non-embarrassingly parallel algorithms. Especially with the CM-2 and 64 bit floating point.
1. I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.
2. If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.
>I think you're describing publishing and not academia as a whole. It's sad that the two have become so intractable in many minds.
Yes, exactly. I was specifically referring to publishing, because OP was specifically referring to publishing:
> I wish this idea would take hold in academia. So many papers seem to bury simple and often powerful ideas in jargon.
> If you don't ever cater to general audiences your field is less accessible in many important ways. Which seems like intentional gatekeeping given the economic realities of #1.
I never said to not ever cater to general audiences. I said that catering to general audiences is not the purpose of a research paper. Separation of concerns. Communication to general audiences is still necessary and worthwhile.
In fact, there's a feedback loop between science, technology, and capital. Not communicating results from academia breaks or reduces the effectiveness of this feedback loop. So, yes, you are absolutely correct that academic papers should be communicated to general audiences.
2. The purpose of a scientific paper is not to communicate it to general audiences. It's to describe, in detail, a study you performed so that others can attempt to reproduce it. The audience of a scientific paper is other scientists in the same field. Communication of the results to a general audience is another matter.