Academia is usually about minutiae, not concepts. Sometimes they get so hyperfocus in small areas that they are completely unable to give a general summary of what they are doing in the bigger picture. To do so would require them to understand things outside of their very narrow field of study.

I don't expect a scientific article to be understandable for someone outside the field, but do yourself the disfavour and ask a random scientist, what it is they're actually doing and to explain it in simple terms. Most can't. And that says to me, that these people never learned (or were taught) how to actually boil a concept down to its essence. And that I think is pretty bad.

As an example, two scientists from different fields could work on almost the same problem from different angles, but they would never know that if they talked to each other, because they are unable to express their work in a way the other person can understand.

This is why I believe scientists should be required to take liberal arts classes; especially related to written and spoken language. Trying to read a scientific paper as an outsider is painfully hard because you're trying to understand what the Big Words are trying to say, but then the paper also takes a borderline meandering path that loops back on itself or has sections that mean nothing, leaving you (or at least, me) confused. Like, c'mon man, I'm trying to understand what you're saying, but your narrative is more convoluted than House of Leaves.

How can you expect to truly make a breakthrough in science if you struggle to accurately and precisely convey your ideas to your peers? Study the great writers so your papers can have great writing and results.

If it helps, try doing it from a scientific perspective - as if you're studying a brand new creature or property of physics - and make notes on things like,

How the author expresses their ideas.

Was the author easily understandable?

What, if anything, made it easier or harder for you to understand what was written?

What elements made the writing more precise, concise and/or accurate to what the author was trying to convey (using outside sources)?

...and so forth.

(And yes, I also think liberal arts students should be required to take some level of hard STEM classes (not watered-down "libarts-compatible" stuff, but actual physics, chemistry, biology, etc) as well.)

Edit: you might even end up with a reputation for being more intelligent than you actually are, simply because you're able to convey your ideas significantly better than your peers.

Edit 2: or alternatively, study a programming language until you're decent at it, and then write your papers as if you're trying to explain them to a computer.

A big reason why newspapers use so many filler-phrases and redundancy and just don't get to the point is because journalists often get paid for how much they write; The consequence is obviously: filler-words.

Getting paid for "how much they write" may be implicit. For example, the boss might look at what the employees produce and say "ok this employee is good because they wrote 30 pages, this employee is bad because they wrote only 5". Even though they might get a fixed salary/month, the one that writes few pages might get fired.

Every single word in the original post clarifies more than plain English. It is more specific and has better nuance than a plain translation.

That doesn't make it a useful explanation because the audience of the statement is not the in-group using the jargon.

One part of my daily job is translating "technical" into "manager". The translation always loses fidelity to the original. Jargon exists because it's useful, not because there's a deliberate attempt to keep others out. Some will then use it as a shibboleth but that does not mean it's original purpose was such.

For what it's worth: that's true of all translations. I've done real time translation from Italian into English and it's always missing the nuance of the original. I've read the divine comedy in English and Italian and the English is always missing the context and nuance.

Language is an abstract representation of concepts and never maps faithfully.

exactly, i've noticed some people on youtube can be REALLY good at this, like Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong for example. Just introduce your jargon the first time it's used and put up a little explanation every time afterward.