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> I suspect they do so as a means of gatekeeping

I'm surprised at how could you get at this conclusion. Formalisms, esoteric language and syntax are hard for everyone. Why would people invest in them if their only usefulness was gatekeeping? Specially when it's the same people who will publish their articles in the open for everyone to read.

A more reasonable interpretation is that those fields use those things you don't like because they're actually useful to them and to their main audience, and that if you want to actually understand those concepts they talk about, that syntax will end up being useful to you too. And that a lack of syntax would not make things easier to understand, just less precise.


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