GOOD DESIGN IS SIMPLE. You hear this from math to painting. In math it means that a shorter proof tends to be a better one. Where axioms are concerne… - Paul Graham

Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, nerds deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter.

The main reason nerds are unpopular is that they have other things to think about.

I was very impressed by the papers published in philosophy journals. They were so beautifully typeset, and their tone was just captivating — alternately casual and buffer-overflowingly technical. A fellow would be walking along a street and suddenly modality qua modality would spring upon him. I didn't ever quite understand these papers, but I figured I'd get around to that later, when I had time to reread them more closely. In the meantime I tried my best to imitate them. This was, I can now see, a doomed undertaking, because they weren't really saying anything. No philosopher ever refuted another, for example, because no one said anything definite enough to refute. Needless to say, my imitations didn't say anything either.