The speaker recalls that researchers often conveyed a paper's central idea clearly in a few informal conversational sentences, even when understanding it from the paper was more involved.

“maybe the most prominent example is i remember uh back in my phd days doing research etc uh you read someone's paper right and you work you try to understand what it's doing etc and then you catch them you're having beers at the conference later and you ask them so like this paper like so what were you doing like what is the paper about and they will just tell you these like three sentences that like perfectly capture the essence”

“of that paper and totally give you the idea and you didn't have to read the paper”

“like it's only when you're sitting at the table with a beer or something like that and like”

“and like oh yeah the paper is just oh you take this idea you take that idea and try this experiment and uh and you try out this thing and they have a way of just putting it conversationally Right. and just like perfectly like why isn't that the abstract”