It could be worse

Reading academic papers on cryptography is hard. It's not like reading music, where you can sit down at the piano and hack your way through a new piece of music. Sure, you'll make lots of mistakes your first time through, and it may sound so bad that you want to do it well away from other people, but you'll get through it fairly quickly. Reading papers on cryptography is much worse, at least it is for me. Getting through a paper and understanding what it really says usually takes me at least a few days. Maybe more if I don't get a good night's sleep or drink enough coffee.

Some papers take much longer than that to understand. Back when Andrew Wiles proved Fermat's Last Theorem, I realized that I'd never understand Wiles' proof, so I tried something much less ambition: to read and understand a paper that explained exactly why what Wiles proved, the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture for semistable elliptic curves, implies that Fermat's Last Theorem is true. Even that turned out to be too hard, and I eventually gave up on it.

I recently learned that it's not just papers on cryptography that are hard to understand, but papers on other topics may hard to understand for an entirely different reason, and that's because they're poorly written. There are apparently so many poorly-written academic papers that the editors of Philosophy and Literature felt the need to run a bad writing contest that showcased some of the worst academic writing around.  Here are some of the past winners of this contest:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Judith Butler, "Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time,” Diacritics

Total presence breaks on the univocal predication of the exterior absolute the absolute existent(of that of which it is not possible to univocally predicate an outside, while the equivocal predication of the outside of the absolute exterior is possible of that of which the reality so predicated is not the reality, viz., of the dark/of the self, the identity of which is not outside the absolute identity of the outside, which is to say that the equivocal predication of identity is possible of the self-identity which is not identity, while identity is univocally predicated of the limit to the darkness, of the limit of the reality of the self). This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light. The precision of the absolutely minimum transcendence of the dark is the light itself/the absolutely unconditioned exteriority of existence for the first time/the absolutely facial identity of existence/the proportion of the new creation sans depth/the light itself ex nihilo: the dark itself univocally identified, i.e., not self-identity identity itself equivocally, not the dark itself equivocally, in “self-alienation,” not “self-identity, itself in self-alienation” “released” in and by “otherness,” and “actual other,” “itself,” not the abysmal inversion of the light, the reality of the darkness equivocally, absolute identity equivocally predicated of the self/selfhood equivocally predicated of the dark (the reality of this darkness the other-self-covering of identity which is the identification person-self).

D.G. Leahy, Foundation: Matter the Body Itself

So I suppose that it could be worse. Instead of having to read and understand papers on cryptography, I could have to read and understand papers in some other field. Based on some of the entries into Philosophy and Literature's bad writing contest, I may be fairly lucky.