Clearly there's a balance to be struck here: You want your posts to include everything that's necessary for your audience to understand it, but no more. "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away”, as they say. And clearly, the more technical a post is, the greater the risk that it won't be understood.
However, when it comes to your example of scientific papers, I definitely do feel that some academicians should be more concise! For economics papers, often about 80% of the paper is simply repetition of what other people wrote, sometimes solely to show that the author did their research. Maybe 5% is original input, and the rest is repetition (again, less so for technical papers). Philosophers tend to be even worse!
Scholarship is a virtue, and placing what you did in the wider context is a very important part of pushing science forward (civilization could advance faster if people were more aware of other stuff out there -- how many times have people reinvented graphical models?)
Signal to noise depends on the quality of the author -- there are plenty of dense papers in academia, in all disciplines.
I like posts that are concise and to the point. Posts like that maximize my information/effort ratio. I would really like to see experienced rationalists simply post a list of things they believe on any given subject with a short explanation for why they believe each of those things. Then I could go ahead and adjust my beliefs based on those lists as necessary.
Sadly I don’t see any posts like this. Presumably this is because of the social convention where you’re expected to back up any public belief with arguments, so that other people can attempt to poke holes in them. I find this strange because the arguments people present rarely have anything to do with why they believe those things, which makes the whole exercise a giant distraction from the main point that the author is trying to bring across. In order to prevent this kind of derailment, posters tend to cover their arguments with endless qualifications so that their sentences read like this: “I personally believe that, in cases X Y Z and under circumstances B and C, ceteris paribus and barring obvious exceptions, it seems safe to say that murder is wrong, though of course I could be mistaken.” The problems with such excessive argumentation and qualification are threefold:
By contrast, terseness makes posts more readable and makes it less likely that the main point is misunderstood. So if we as a community could just relax the demand for argumentation and qualification somewhat, and we all focussed on debating the main points of posts instead of getting sidetracked, then perhaps experienced rationalists here could write nice and concise posts that give clear and direct answers to complicated questions. Instead, some of the sequences are so long and involve so many arguments, counter-arguments and disclaimers that I feel the point is lost entirely.