why do academics always use such fancy words in their papers and when they talk?

isn't this the opposite of einstein's idea of "explaining it to a six year old"?

cofounder @ Internet Friends, Inc. (YC S22). Trying to be more curious about the world!

"Furthermore, the use of complex language can also be seen as a way for academics to demonstrate their expertise and knowledge in their field, and to signal their membership in a particular intellectual community"

it always comes back to signaling huh https://i.imgur.com/eC8Wivx.png

I feel like it might be easier to use a word to describe a concept rather than write out a bunch of sentences. But for the reader it’s a lil harder to understand cuz those words can be overloaded

Academic literature is dense in taxonomy as a compression function. Trying to expand out the terms used in a typical paper to “plain English” would make these papers highly redundant with one another and also take thousands of pages. It would be cool if there were a way to offer those expansions in the text though.