I Was Internet-Famous

No, but the first couple of paragraphs of my most recent blog post[1] are.

> I think calling clear and understandable writing for "anti-intellectual" is the stupidest thing I have heard in a long time.

Yeah, that would be pretty stupid. Good thing I didn't do that, I guess.

> I agree with your sentiment that writings rich in vocabulary can be a "fun obstacle course" but if you have an actual message you want to convey, it is usually not a good idea to hide it behind an obstacle course.

Sure, but I think you're hinting that the "but if" part is a given in all writing. I mostly do technical writing where my aim is to inform. I also try to entertain since it helps people stick around long enough to be informed.

But that's a pretty narrow slice of the kinds of things people can express in language. Think about poetry, satire, koans, philosophy, and metafiction. Imagine what little would be left of House of Leaves after a technical book editor had their way with it.

A huge part of the experience of reading is decoding the author's language back into your own mentalese. For many authors, like mine, the goal is generally to make that process as easy and transparent as possible to help their reader focus their attention on the unadorned ideas.

But some of my favorite reading experiences were ones that required me to stretch my brain, or that juxtaposed a series of words together in such a surprising, novel way that I felt I'd seen a new color for the first time. Some ideas have lodged permanently in my head not because the author shot them into my skull with the ease of a crossbow bolt but because I had to tear apart the author's words with my bare hands and stuff each dripping piece of knowledge in my own mouth.

[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2015/09/08/the-hardest-pro...

A bad example (because of the resulting verbosity and inexactness). It's an example of how simple words are inadequate to explain complex ideas succinctly

> You can in fact write clear and concisely in a phd thesis

You ignored the rest of my sentence. I did not say [you cannot write a "clear and understandable" PhD thesis]. I said [you cannot write a "clear and understandable" PhD thesis in Linguistics while avoiding five-dollar words]

> But since the author assumes the reader has a large background knowledge in the field, it will still not be accessible to the average reader

Who exactly is the "average reader" of academic writing?

It sounds to me like you are making a blanket statement: "jargon is bad". I am saying jargon provides useful ways of expression.