Math writing is dull when it neglects the human dimension

Right, but certain methods are more effective than others. This paper is arguing and encouraging exactly how to manipulate more effectively.

> It might as well do it in a helpful way

Being more effective in teaching I agree is a good thing. But a math paper isn't for teaching, it's for showing a proof or making an argument. I just think we ought to set standards on academic research to remain as neutral as possible to let ideas flourish on merit rather than cunning tricks.

EDIT: I get that a career in academia requires all these games to get more citations. Looks at ML research, I feel like abstracts are written by used car salesman nowadays. So like, if you have to do it do it. But we ought to call it out from time to time.

When I did that, a version of the derogatory sentence "The proofs are easy / non-technical." would appear in the reviews. Every. Single. Time. Of course, I have some independent confirmation that the proofs weren't easier than in any of my other work (e.g. my coauthors and I had to work just as hard to get them), but this led to having to resubmit them to less prestigious journals than the ones which normally published my work.

I gave up on this approach, and realize now that the opposite is more likely to be rewarded: out of 18 eventually-published papers, I only managed to piss off the referees enough for a revise/resubmit decision once, and I really went out of my way to keep the proofs vague that time.

Of course, I had a largely unremarkable career in a somewhat niche subfield: I'm sure there are levels where (a), (b), and more importantly the sheer speed required to get a result out are bigger incentives. And from yet other fields, I occasionally hear rumors of people who master the art of opaque writing and "parallel construction" only to make it difficult for others to get ahead of them (hi שַשֶׁ!).

If the journal demands you remove the appendix or supplementary, just remove it from the published manuscript. Then add it to your ArXiv submission.

Today, most of the math is figuring out how to solve an equation, i.e. to give an algorithm to calculate the solution. We then "quantize" the algorithm to a state machine (e.g. convert reals to floats, algorithm steps to machine code), so that we could run the state machine on a computer and get a result.

However, once you know what it takes to invert boolean functions, you don't need the solution step, you can just quantize your equation (problem) directly to a SAT instance, and let the inversion algorithm do all the hard work. No (elegant and readable) math is required anymore.

So I think we better treat mathematics as a "useless" human artifact (like art or chess) rather than something of practical value.

1. The problem in math is not that the way the "orthodoxy" insists on presenting things in a suboptimal way, but that if the reviewers find a good explanation of your result, they'll recommend that you publish in a lower-ranked venue than your result would ordinarily merit (at least unless you solved a famous problem). So researchers are incentivized to make the presentations of the proofs as opaque as possible. You can see this in conference and workshop talks (which tend to happen pre-publication in math), in many fields speakers always avoid presenting _any_ proofs. Putting better explanations in an appendix, which the referees can read, simply wouldn't help.

2. Being easy-to-understand at first is actively punished, but even being easy-to-understand in the long run is not rewarded. You can always write an explanatory blog post after the publication decision has been made, but you won't put effort into writing one if you don't gain anything from it. This applies even more to the people in the example, who wrote on a typewriter in the 1970s. There were no blogs, and it was much harder to get an appendix through because page limits were physical limits, and the act of writing was much more onerous before the age of computers and LaTeX. There was no point to doing it given that it was actively discouraged.