From Richard Dawkins’ introduction to A Devil’s Chaplain:
Dawkin’s Law of the Conservation of Difficulty states that obscurantism in an academic subject expands to fill the vacuum of its intrinsic simplicity. Physics is a genuinely difficult and profound subject, so physicists need to —and do— work hard to make their language as simple as possible (‘but no simpler,’ rightly insisted Einstein.) Other academics —some would point the finger at continental schools of literary criticism and social science— suffer from what Peter Medawar called Physics Envy. They want to be thought profound, but their subject is actually rather easy and shallow, so they have to language it up to redress the balance.
From “Postmodernism Disrobed”:
Suppose you are an intellectual impostor with nothing to say, but with strong ambitions to succeed in academic life, collect a coterie of reverent disciples and have students around the world anoint your pages with respectful yellow highlighter. What kind of literary style would you cultivate? Not a lucid one, surely, for clarity would expose your lack of content.
Or as David Byrne sings in “Psycho Killer”:
You’re talking a lot
but you’re not saying anything
When I have nothing to say
my lips are sealed
But let’s be clear: there is plenty of shitty writing going on in the sciences, too.
Via “Deep Simplicity: A Personal Graphics Manifesto (Part 2)” by Alberto Cairo, a piece in which he’s pointing out the needless jumble of a lot of infographics floating around out there.