[HN Gopher] The culture of rejection in computer science publica... ___________________________________________________________________ The culture of rejection in computer science publications Author : headalgorithm Score : 201 points Date : 2022-08-26 10:24 UTC (12 hours ago) (HTM) web link (sigbed.org) (TXT) w3m dump (sigbed.org) | Athas wrote: | I wonder if this culture arises out of necessity. Many | conferences claim to not have a set quota of papers they accept, | but in practice there is a limitation to how many presentations | can be accommodated given the physical and temporal limitations | of the venue. The quota may grow slightly over time, either by | shrinking the time allotted to every presentation (ICFP is really | squeezing it these years, for example) or adding parallel tracks, | but there are ultimately fairly hard physical restrictions. This | inevitably limits how many submissions can be accepted, which | also creates an otherwise unnecessary air of competition, even | between otherwise unrelated papers. | | Journals don't have this restriction; you can always put out more | volumes. I suppose I enjoy conferences as much as any CS | practitioner, but it does not strike me as a sustainable or | scalable publication method. | xhkkffbf wrote: | But journals do have an economic restriction. More pages cost | more money and the subscription fees only go so far. I suppose | page charges might balance some of the editorial costs, but | those are also limiting. They can't be too high or they'll | chase away submissions. | musicale wrote: | > More pages cost more money and the subscription fees only | go so far | | arxiv.org's budget is instructive: around $2M for 181K new | submissions and a digital library of around 2M articles. | Works out to about $12 per new submission. | | For a reviewed journal or conference, presumably all | published papers would have to be reviewed, much as they are | currently by volunteer reviewers who review all papers before | publication or rejection. If Prof. Lee is right then | reviewing effort could go down overall due to fewer | resubmissions. | jononor wrote: | 12 USD is the current cost per submission. But I do not | think that they need to 2x their budget to handle 2x the | amount of articles. Marginal costs per article will be | lower. | | But your point stands, this stuff costs real money. So I | just donated 100 USD to Arxiv, as they host a few of my | papers. And thousands of other articles that I have read, | for free and super accessibly. | Athas wrote: | Modern journals don't actually print all that much, and I'd | expect the marginal cost of publishing additional papers to | be very low. | hannob wrote: | Honestly this only touches a small fraction of how absurd the | whole publishing system with conferences is. | | I mean just thing about some obvious issues: Large parts of | computer science limit how much science they can publish (and | thus effectively share with others) by the number of conferences | people want to organize. There's also a very obvious | discrimination issue, as most "high tier" conferences are either | in the US or (to a lesser extent) in the EU. And it's pretty | crazy that people do transatlantic flights to go to a conference | in order to publish a paper, even if they don't really want to go | to the conference. | adamsmith143 wrote: | The lack of Novelty point feels off the mark, at least in some | fields. At least in ML its extremely common for a paper to just | report a new benchmark on some well known dataset with virtually | no new real contributions other than more time spent | hyperparemeter turning | paulpauper wrote: | _The emphasis on novelty has deep roots in academic publishing. | It used to be that publishing was expensive, and any repetition | came at the expense of other things that could have been | published. Today, however, publishing is essentially free._ | | Yes, publishing is cheap or free, but attention is still scarce. | mirker wrote: | In hot fields, you have arXiv papers 2-3 generations ahead of | peer review. Some have more citations than typical accepted | papers. Peer review does not limit people's attention. | wanderingmind wrote: | I think we are not far off from virtual conferences where most | sessions are presented by DallE generated presenters, speaking | with wavenet generated audios in turn are presenting GPT | generated papers. | xor99 wrote: | haha oke I didn't think about this as a possibility. | throwawayacc2 wrote: | Now that's a fun hackathon project if I ever saw one! | mizzao wrote: | Basically already happening in many Chinese departments and | conferences, just without the AI yet, but of equivalent | quality. | | (I'm ethnic Chinese and this is not meant to be a racially | charged comment) | LunaSea wrote: | Could you give a bit more context about this? I'm not | familiar with the subject. | lioeters wrote: | I think they're just joking that some of the material | presented at Chinese academic conferences are close to non- | sense, might as well be produced by DALL-E. | walleeee wrote: | Can't speak to the state of Chinese academia but have had | a few similar experiences at American conferences | | When careers are on the line and one is expected to | mischaracterize one's work or its impact, people will | tend to do so | | If this problem exists independently of cultural or | institutional factors maybe there are potential solutions | with an equally broad range of application | mizzao wrote: | I think the performative, results-based culture of academia | in general (particularly in Asia and not just Chinese) has | seriously succumbed to Goodhart's law: | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law | | Because you are judged on citations, publication count in | prestigious journals, and research dollars spent... you | have people citing themselves and their friends in citation | rings, gaming the referee process to pick reviewers, and | doing unethical things for money. | | My first experience in this is when I was asked (as a | postdoc) to give a keynote for a no-name conference in | Vancouver. They were paying so why not? I later realized | that my pedigree was being used to lend credence to a | conference that was totally cargo cult academia. There were | conference sessions, and people presenting, and bunches of | people in several rooms, but nothing was actually being | said and nothing was being done. They then offered me | $3,000 cash in an envelope which I declined to take most of | because of ethical reasons (I only wanted to cover my | expenses). A very unique, maybe even out-of-body experience | to stay the least. | | If you want to see a crazy instantiation of cargo cult | academia, google "extreme learning machines", which is | basically a whole field built off of 2-layer feedforward | neural networks with 1 randomly initialized layer. The | other keynote at this conference was the guy who "started" | this field. | UmbertoNoEco wrote: | '(I'm ethnic Chinese and this is not meant to be a racially | charged comment)' | | that's not a carte blanche to stereotype a whole nation and | it makes as much sense as a mailander chinese person | badmouthing singapore taiwan or the abcs and using that | excuse | bcantrill wrote: | It's a good article, but it's not making the (obvious?) jump: | _the conference model in computer science is broken_. No other | discipline does it this way, and it creates for ourselves this | terrible program committee problem. The journal model has plenty | of its own flaws, but it at least allows for iterative work. | (That is, instead of rejecting a work outright, a journal can | work with an author on the flaws, even if that requires doing | substantial new work.) This is not to lionize the journal model, | which has plenty of its own flaws -- and indeed, I personally | think computer science should use its current laggard status as | an opportunity to find a wholly new model, preferably one that is | much more amenable to practitioner participation.[0] | | [0] https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16/technical- | sessions/p... | ath0 wrote: | I'm long past my academia phase, but recently led the PC for an | industry conference (accept rate: ~15%). | | 1. Curation is important both for the physical limits (venues | only fit a certain number of people), attention limits (attendees | will usually retain only a handful of "nuggets" no matter how | packed the agenda is) and interaction limits (you can't meet | everyone at a large conference). | | 2. If the goal of a conference is not just to "stamp" research as | somehow "approved", but to encourage discovery and knowledge | exchange that deepens a specific area, it's important to apply | that curation filter with an eye toward best advancing the goals | of the conference. That means not just going for things that are | okay, but those that best resonate with other presentations / | attendees / research topics. | | 3. While the size of any _one_ conference has to be fixed, tech | has made it infinitely easier to create _new_ conferences and | journals with other focus areas. They may not start with the | prestige of a larger journal, but if the papers published start | to have an impact, it can catalyze an entire subfield of work. | | Some conferences can be tied exclusively to "novelty" - ACM | academic conferences - but others to "incremental advancements" - | the bigger industry conferences in security, like Usenix Security | and some to "best explaining ideas" - like Enigma. | | There are new ways to find an audience for your work and create | impact - that's part of the job now. | kleingeld wrote: | Try "publishing" in https://researchers.one | blagie wrote: | I'm well-known in a research community. I'm positioned such | that I don't need more academic points. I've mostly stopped | publishing in branded prestige academic venues, in part due to | rejection rates. | | My goal in doing work and writing papers is to see them | disseminated. The acceptance/rejection process is asinine -- | studies show it's basically random. I've had one paper in my | whole career where the reviewers did a proper review (e.g. | worked through the math). The rest were quick skims. Comments | often show the reviewers never read the paper. The stuff that | makes it through this process is often nonsense, while very | high-quality work is often cut. | | The very best paper I wrote in my career has never seen the | light of day. It was shortened to a 4-page work-in-progress | because a reviewer didn't read it (the feedback was literally | nonsense: that the sample size was small enough to be | anecdotal; I had the largest sample size in the history of the | research field). | | The only impact of this egoistical search for prestige-by-low- | accept-rates is that people who have better things to do with | their time leave, and that research dissemination is slowed. | | Those excuses make little sense in the real world: | | 1) If your conference has a 10% accept rate, it's easy enough | to book a bigger venue next year. I've been to conferences with | dozens of people, and ones with tens of thousands. It all works | well. Bigger ones work better, if anything. | | 2) PCs aren't thoughtful enough to do that well, and even so, | the goal of a conference shouldn't be to select things which | resonate with the entrenched PC. That's why many ideas need to | wait for a generation of old, conservative professors to die to | make it out there. | | 3) The whole obsession with prestige is stupid and misguided. | | Journals and conferences ought to have quality bars. Are there | typos and grammar errors? Were there clear IRB ethic | violations? Did you use error bars on your plots? Was data | fabricated? Is the research methodologically sound? Is it | coherent and readable? And so on. If it passes those bars, it | should be published. If no one reads it / attends a talk, | that's okay too -- importance can and should be determined | after-the-fact. | BeetleB wrote: | > Comments often show the reviewers never read the paper. | | This. I was not in computer science, but in a different | technical field, and this is sadly common. We would often | have to appeal to the editor with "The topic the reviewer | said we didn't address? It's in Section X. Get us another | reviewer." | sideshowb wrote: | I've learned to address those ones diplomatically with "the | topic you mention is now included in section X". | Technically true, and lower friction. | SilasX wrote: | Haha yes. Everyday example of this frustration (really | happened): | | "So when is their wedding?" | | 'Next week on Saturday.' | | "Whoa whoa whoa, do you mean _this coming_ Saturday, or | the Saturday that happens _next week_? " | | 'Next week on Saturday.' | | "Okay, gotcha, thanks, it was kinda unclear before." | whatshisface wrote: | The biggest mystery in the whole thing is why someone who | is _volunteering_ to review papers _anonymously_ would | bother to do it badly when they could simply not do it at | all. | BeetleB wrote: | Because they want to _appear_ as if they are an active | participant in the community. | blagie wrote: | No mystery. Behavior converges to incentives: | | * You do get academic points for chairing a conference, | and as a chair, you do need to find reviewers. | | * A colleague is running a conference, and asks you to do | a favor. You want to help your colleague. Reviewing | papers wins you points with them, and declining to review | burns bridges. When you're running a conference, you'd | like them to reciprocate. Plus, they might be on a grant | / hiring / etc. board / committee / etc. later on. | Burning bridges in academia is very bad. | | On the other hand, there is no incentive to invest more | than 30-600 seconds per review. Neither you nor your | friend really have any reason to care about the quality | of the conference. | | As this process repeats, people put in less and less time | each time around, since it doesn't matter. The process | converges to random noise. | whatshisface wrote: | > _Reviewing papers wins you points with them, and | declining to review burns bridges. When you 're running a | conference, you'd like them to reciprocate._ | | Surely they'd get upset if you rejected all of the good | papers, thereby ensuring that they would have a bad | conference. | Jensson wrote: | Just accept people who has held a lot of conference talks | before and it will be fine. That is the fastest and | easiest way to review, so unless there is pressure to do | things differently that is how most will do it. | | If there is space still left at the end you can look at | the others and take the first paper that looks fine until | there are no spots left. | ghaff wrote: | There is (for good reason) more focus today on diversity | --broadly defined e.g. new speakers--for non-academic | conferences these days. However, there were quite a few | conferences in the tech sector historically that tended | to have a core of "the usual suspects" with others | grabbing a smaller number of leftover slots. TBH, I | probably benefited from this over the years. (Conferences | run by companies follow somewhat different rules but | still usually have a stable of Top Rated Speakers who | tend to get slots.) | gautamdivgi wrote: | I think this happens in all fields. It's probably a | professor on a PC dumping the review on an unsuspecting and | overworked PhD student or MS student who really doesn't | care and just wants to get some sleep. | | And yes - say what one may - PhD students are overworked | and underpaid at least in most of the US. | kleiba wrote: | _studies show it 's basically random_ | | The "basically" is important though, because there are some | nuances to it. | | However, the point I've actually come here to make is that | since publications are a strong factor for your career | progress in academia, a corollary of the above is that making | it in academia is basically random, too. Which is also true | for other reasons, though: for every open professor position | in a certain field, there are usually a number of candidates | that are all equally highly qualified. But only one of them | can get the gig. If the selection is not random, then it's | typically based on other factors, such as, how well you are | connected, your gender, whether some other professor at the | faculty fears competition from you, etc. -- which may not be | random, but is equally out of your control in all but a few | cases. | marcosdumay wrote: | I may have been radicalized during my short time in the | academic world, but IMO, conferences are a really bad setting | to disseminate new ideas. They just don't favor it. In | practice, you have people preaching their ideas, a lot of | people not listening, and a few misunderstanding. Nobody | else. | | Spreading ideas is better done on paper, with guided | discussion, and without time limits. Or, in other worlds, on | something like paper-split hierarchical internet forums. | | Conferences can be useful to discuss and work over known | ideas. For that, they should always bring papers that are | already published, and had some community attention. The idea | of debuting new ideas over unprepared people is antagonistic | to that goal. | agumonkey wrote: | > My goal in doing work and writing papers is to see them | disseminated. The acceptance/rejection process is asinine -- | studies show it's basically random. I've had one paper in my | whole career where the reviewers did a proper review (e.g. | worked through the math). The rest were quick skims. Comments | often show the reviewers never read the paper. The stuff that | makes it through this process is often nonsense, while very | high-quality work is often cut. | | How come this is not fixed ? | Jensson wrote: | Because the leaders are the people who made their careers | in the current system and they wouldn't benefit from making | things more meritocratic. These are the people who argues | endlessly saying meritocracy is bad for reason X or reason | Y, they just want to keep their current privileges. | tokinonagare wrote: | > Comments often show the reviewers never read the paper. | | And when they do, it's not sure they understood it or even | put the slightest towards understanding. I've a rejected | paper where one of the comment was that the header of a table | featuring 4 columns named N, V, ADJ, ADV was "hard to | understand". The table was between two paragraphs each | mentioning nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs, in a paper | mostly about dictionary... | theaeolist wrote: | > 3. While the size of any one conference has to be fixed, tech | has made it infinitely easier to create new conferences and | journals with other focus areas. They may not start with the | prestige of a larger journal, but if the papers published start | to have an impact, it can catalyze an entire subfield of work. | | Does it though? The largest conferences I go to as a CS | academic have hundreds of people. There are academic areas | where 10x people participate. The size limitation is a self- | imposed excuse to keep acceptance low. I have been PC chair of | two conferences and my attempts to expand the conference | numbers were shot down by the steering committee precisely for | this reason, not because we couldn't find a larger room. | snickerbockers wrote: | >Serving on a PC is a yeoman's service, and the community owes | them a debt of gratitude. However, I believe that a toxic culture | has emerged. This blog is a call for PCs to change their | priorities. | | does that acronym not stand for what i think it does? | secondcoming wrote: | Probably not, but I don't know what it actually does stand for. | It's definitely not Personal Computer | Hackbraten wrote: | The acronym is not web-search friendly either. Been looking | through this thread and search engines. Nothing helped. | | For example, not a single one of these [1] makes sense to me | in that context. | | [1]: https://www.allacronyms.com/PC/university | warkdarrior wrote: | Some times you will see the acronym TPC for Technical | Program Committee. Searching for 'conference TPC' returns | some relevant hits. | xdavidliu wrote: | this is one of my pet peeves. You and dozens of other | people probably spent collectively hundreds to thousands of | minutes and brain cells wondering what PC stood for, while | the people who originally typed "PC" instead of program | committee saved maybe a fifth of a second. | warkdarrior wrote: | PC stands for Program Committee, the selected group of people | in charge of accepting and rejecting paper submissions. | theaeolist wrote: | Program Committee | faangiq wrote: | CS has a ton of people in it and they produce a lot of garbage | papers. Oh you retrained your ML model? Boom, new paper. | 22SAS wrote: | I completely agree with this. I have seen papers produced by a | bunch of newly minted PhD's and the first thought that came in | my mind was "WTF is this? There's nothing in this that's new or | makes sense". | | A lot of publishing, from outside the top research | universities, seems to be mainly at showing a higher | publication count to get more funding and impress tenure | committees. | | Some of the professors, who do this, make you wonder how they | get their PhD in the first place. Back in my masters, I was | giving a presentation on a paper from FB, where they were going | over scheduling policies they had been using in their hadoop | clusters. The professor reviewing asked me a question "You're | taking about scheduling tasks in distributed environments, | you're talking about Hadoop, Hadoop is for files what | scheduling does it do?". Some of us there had a big "WTF" | plastered on our face. Couldn't even argue cause this prof. | thought he was a hotshot and would make life hell for students | who did. In his own words to a student "I can write a compiler, | I can write an operating system, but I can't make head or tail | of what you're doing". | dekhn wrote: | Nothing has made me happier than to simply leave the | academic/publishing side of CS and focus entirely on things that | I find interesting and can do on a single desktop computer. If I | share, I share and give people my code and ideas freely, but | don't publish. Why would I want to take all my hard work and beg | somebody with power to put it on a piece of paper? | | If I have something useful to say I'll put it in arxiv. Peer | reviewers just wasted my time. | raphlinus wrote: | This topic is close to my heart. I do research on the | fundamentals of 2D graphics, some of it cutting edge (especially | GPU techniques), others just selecting the best known techniques | (for example, right now I'm doing a bit of a deep dive into | robust cubic and quartic polynomial root finders, not really | academically publishable, but potentially hugely useful for | others working on similar problems). | | I made a serious attempt to submit some of my GPU monoid work to | academic conferences earlier this year, got rejected. As someone | who doesn't have the "publish or perish" incentive of actually | being in academia, it's really just not worth it. | | I'm also doing inquiry into UI, for example architectural | patterns in reactive systems. The current state of academic | literature on this topic seems to be terrible (though please | point out counterexamples!). Most of what's written is marketing | material for UI frameworks - there's an explosion of those, | especially in the JavaScript world, but very little synthesis of | the core concepts. I wouldn't even attempt to try to submit an | academic paper on this topic, though I think it would likely be | useful to the world. | | It feels like there _should_ be a space to publish work that is | not novel in an academic sense, but useful. Wikipedia is not it | (their articles on cubic and quartic equations are garbage when | it comes to numerical concerns), Stack Overflow is not it, | academic conferences and journals are not it. I 'm using my blog, | generally successfully, but it feels there should be a more | systematic approach. | YorkshireSeason wrote: | I found myself in a somewhat similar situation. I learned to | thing long-term: | | (1) Publish initial ideas not in top conferences, but in second | rate venues. Most publications in top conferences are, clearly, | refinements of ideas that were first presented in inchoate | form, in less prestigious workshops. Paradoxically, prestigious | conferences don't like brand new ideas, but they like | _polished_ papers. And they like concrete open problems being | _solved_. If a paper starts "We are solving the longstanding | open problem from [17]" then that dramatically increases | acceptance probability: most submissions to prestigious | conferences are not rejected b/c they are wrong, but because | it's unclear why they are more siginficant than all the other | submissions. Solving a concrete open problem gives you social | proof that the problem is significant (others worked on it) and | hard (people failed). How do you create concrete open problems? | By leaving them as concrete open problems in a previous paper. | | (2) Create your own conferences. All now famous conferences | started as small, low prestige workshops 10-20 years ago, e.g. | the "Oakland" security workshop (now: IEEE Symposium on | Security and Privacy). | | I learned this from my post-doc mentor, who is now a famous | scientist with a whole research tradition to his name, that he | created, bootstrapping from a first workshop paper. | | PS, is your monoid work online, is it this | https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11659 ? I'm interested in monoids on | GPUs. | raphlinus wrote: | > PS, is your monoid work online, is it this | https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11659 ? I'm interested in monoids | on GPUs. | | Yes, that's the draft on arXiv, and I have a blog post in the | pipeline[1] explaining it to a more general audience. | | And thanks for the other advice, I'll consider it! | | [1] | https://github.com/raphlinus/raphlinus.github.io/issues/66 | noelwelsh wrote: | The Programming Journal (https://programming-journal.org/) and | its associated conference seem pretty good to me. At least I | find papers there that are interesting to me and are not | unnecessarily obtuse in notation etc. | | On the subject of reactive UIs, I'm quite enjoying reading the | WebSharper papers at the moment. The most recent is, I think, | http://www.simonjf.com/drafts/reactive-abstractions.pdf | | Hope that's useful to you. | bee_rider wrote: | I wonder if publishing papers onto something like github could | become a tradition. Heck, you could even include an | implementation. People could make pull requests for new ideas, | or even fork your paper... | | Academic journals grew out of the processes that academics used | to communicate with each other and filter ideas through their | community in the pre-internet days. It is weird that they've | become the stamp of approval for all research. | MontyCarloHall wrote: | Add upvotes/downvotes to preprint servers. Weight voting power by | the user's subfield, dynamically determined by who's upvoting | them, PageRank style (so a scientist who's mostly upvoted by | others working in numerical linear algebra would have a lot of | voting power on a preprint describing a novel matrix | factorization scheme, and very little voting power on a preprint | describing a novel thread scheduling algorithm). | | Take the top N upvoted preprints in a given field and showcase | them at a conference for that field. | | And to avoid hype cycles or gaming the system, make voting cost | karma--if you choose to vote, you yourself lose some voting | weight in the process, so votes would only be given out sparingly | to papers that actually deserve them. | nautilius wrote: | Haha, yeah _no way_ anyone's going to game that system! No way | some clique recruits all of the voting power (collaborators to | undergrads) to push their work through, all it takes is LeCun | to simply read _all_ papers and his vote will balance | everything out! | MontyCarloHall wrote: | Easy solution: make it so that voting costs karma, so | individuals only have limited voting power. | nautilius wrote: | Easy fix to your solution: get more people to vote. How | about all 10000 undergrads in your institution? | | In your model, a modern day Einstein would have never had a | chance; industrialized research, with publication mills and | systematic co-authorship permutation is exactly what would | flourish under your model. | MontyCarloHall wrote: | 10k undergrads would have few to no highly upvoted | publications, and thus little to no voting power, even in | aggregate. An even smaller fraction of them would have | highly upvoted papers in the specific subfield of the | paper they're voting on, making their aggregated voting | power even more worthless. | | The only way to game the system would be to somehow | convince a ton of highly upvoted people in a given | subfield to upvote a paper in that particular subfield | (and give up some of their voting power accordingly, | since voting would cost you karma). Heck, make it so that | you can only vote on a certain number of papers each | month (5-10?), to make votes even more valuable. | malfist wrote: | Do we really need to turn publishing into reddit? | MontyCarloHall wrote: | Why not? You're currently posting to a website that | consistently curates high quality content via voting. | DangitBobby wrote: | It can work well in conjunction with good and empowered | moderators. | pessimizer wrote: | True, but I feel like the strength of the moderation at | HN is that it is mostly formal and less editorial. People | are moderated mostly for how they say things, not what | they're saying, especially by explicitly choosing as the | primary criteria for the site _what hackers find | interesting_. | | Not that you couldn't have a narrower focus, but it | should be an explicit focus where the question of whether | something merits moderation is a yes or no question that | could be answered by anyone, rather than a _know it when | I see it_ stance that just reflects the current personal | standards of an individual or clique. | | Does this belong on Hacker News? Was it upvoted and not | flagged too often by people with sufficient karma on | Hacker News? Then dang doesn't have to make a decision. | This is not a perfect characterization, because | moderation here does rarely drop into attempts to exclude | types of discussions that the patrons find annoying | (which is rationalized because the subjects are | controversial and draw in people who want to fight, and | repetitive because these people fight all the time so | have habits and standard arguments.) | | I'm really just expanding on the word "empowered" here, | because most mods have absolute power unless they have to | answer to other mods. The difference here is not power, | it's philosophy. | xor99 wrote: | Yeah, why not. It's already like/comment/subscribe model via | publishing online. This would add a dislike button and you | could have it so it costs karma etc. Would be preferable imo. | evouga wrote: | Please no. Good science is often boring; this system | prioritizes hype and marketing over everything else. | xhkkffbf wrote: | And how do you decide who votes and how many votes each | person gets? A basic democracy favors the young, foolish | masses. The goal of the journal system is to put the smart, | seasoned academics in charge of choosing the best material. | MontyCarloHall wrote: | Plenty of good but "boring" articles make it to the top of | HackerNews every day. Voting systems don't have to devolve | into Reddit. | xor99 wrote: | Anything like this is worth trying. Enhancing the reliability | of peer-to-peer peer review on preprint servers so they become | the de facto publishing base would be ideal. Think how many | younger students could start publishing at undergrad and | earlier. | RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: | > The double-blind review process has eliminated natural biases | that may have influenced our reviews in the past, including | tendencies to reject based on gender or to accept from the | "better" institutions. | | I don't know how much double-blind really helps. Especially in a | specific field, you can usually tell what person/lab/company | wrote the paper without seeing the authors' names. | impendia wrote: | I once reviewed a math paper for a double-blind journal. Most | math journals aren't double blind (as you say, I can often tell | who the authors are) -- but this is one focused on expositional | articles that undergrads might enjoy. | | Anyway, I read it, didn't find it all that interesting, and | recommended that the paper be rejected. | | Afterwards, I googled the paper's title and found a signed | copy: the author was one of the most respected scientists in | our field, who had been a mentor to me and done a huge amount | for my career. | | I was immediately embarrassed: I rejected _his_ work? And right | then I had my moment of zen. | ghaff wrote: | As someone who has been on the conference committee for (non- | academic) conferences, I'm not a particular fan of blind | selections. Yes, I get the desire to not just give slots to | "the usual suspects" which at least historically has often | happened at a lot of conferences I attended. But the reality | is that there are people who you _know_ based on overwhelming | experience will give great talks that attendees will | appreciate and learn from. Even if they submitted an abstract | that didn 't immediately catch your eye among the pile you're | going to accept 25% of, do you really want to reject them? | Assuming the committee has some commitment to new/less known | speakers there are IMO better ways to spread the love than | blinding. | xdavidliu wrote: | > there are people who you know based on overwhelming | experience will give great talks that attendees will | appreciate and learn from ... do you really want to reject | them? | | If I'm reading correctly, you're saying that sometimes a | work deserves to get in based (at least partly) on the | author's name recognition (for historically having given | good talks) and not solely on the merits of the work | itself. I see the point you're trying to make, but | something about this argument makes me uncomfortable. | ghaff wrote: | An abstract isn't a talk. It's a limited description of a | topic (which is often written pretty quickly by | experienced presenters). So, yes, someone who | consistently delivers is probably going to do a pretty | good job unless the abstract just seems uninteresting. | i.e. a good presenter can pick a topic I just don't think | attendees would be interested in or, more commonly, just | isn't a good fit for the program. | | More broadly, yes, you need to balance having people you | know will do a solid job whatever their abstract against | welcoming new speakers. | | Imagine a resume is just so-so. But you've worked with a | person and know they're great. Do you judge them based on | their resume? | Adiqq wrote: | In general I agree that low acceptance rate with negative | selection based on arguments like "it's not novel", "it's | obvious" is toxic. | | I get it that capacity for conference might be limited, so | gatekeeping might be necessity, but personally I like to learn | useful knowledge, so something novel, but theoretical might be | more boring for me than something well known, but improved in | some interesting ways. | | Also composing solutions is interesting, you should not have to | reinvent the wheel, just to get approved, if you want to focus on | broader perspective. The whole is greater than sum of the parts. | xhkkffbf wrote: | But at the core of his arguments is that rejection is mean. | He's complaining about the "it's not novel" argument now but if | everyone takes this to heart, they'll just have to come up with | some other reason to reject. There are only so many resources | and academia tends to massively overproduce talent. | tresqotheq wrote: | I am a simple man. When ever I see the words "Toxic Culture" | spoken by people somehere, I flee the country.. | sstein0 wrote: | Cthulhu_ wrote: | You're not "a simple man", you're an agitator lashing out at | criticisms of behaviour and culture. | tremon wrote: | Isn't the agitator the one who wields the phrase "toxic | culture"? | thaw13579 wrote: | Probably depends on whether the claims are substantiated | with good evidence. | mirror_neuron wrote: | Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you're trying to say that | the phrase "toxic culture" signals something exasperating or | frustrating to you about the person using it. | | Is it because you don't think that a culture can be toxic? Or | perhaps that the phrase is overused or misapplied? | | Or is it something else that you dislike? | selimthegrim wrote: | He is referring to Goering. | mirror_neuron wrote: | That's unexpected! | | I admit that my search was superficial, but I didn't find | any obvious connection between Goering and the phrase | "toxic culture." Could you elaborate? | selimthegrim wrote: | https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Johst | mirror_neuron wrote: | Fascinating. Thank you. | hedora wrote: | I'd like to see a histogram of the number of resubmissions a | paper goes through before acceptance. | | There are definitely papers that get accepted on the first try, | and others that get resubmitted 5+ times. | | It doesn't take many papers in the second group to drag | acceptance rates down. | qzx_pierri wrote: | It doesn't matter what color you are. It doesn't matter where | you're from. If you create something like what Dijkstra created | back in 56' (undeniable innovation), then no door will remain | shut. That's the beauty of Math, CompSci, or STEM as a whole. | | Not to be too blunt, but I'd rather we keep this soft, "everyone | should be accepted" nonsense out of CompSci. The cream will rise | to the top. Anyone complaining just needs to improve, or | innovate. The author even says the reason for rejection is often | "lack of novelty". | | Me personally, I'm not talented enough to even be in the same | conversation as some of the people who are in that "universe", | but that's okay - It just wasn't meant to be for me. If I "stay | in my own lane", that creates more room for the gifted, and the | elite. | BeetleB wrote: | > The cream will rise to the top. | | What makes you think so? | | Having been in academia, my experience doesn't match this | sentiment. | TheOtherHobbes wrote: | The cream isn't rising to the top. I doubt many people on HN - | never mind in the STEM community a a whole - can name anyone | born after 1960 doing research at the level of Dijkstra, Knuth, | Hoare, and maybe Wirth. | | This either means there's no one that smart or original in the | last few generations - possible, but something of a stretch - | or the system isn't successfully selecting, motivating, and | rewarding people with that level of talent. | | My suspicion is that the top people are working in the private | sector, and many of them are doing very highly paid but | questionably useful work as quants and system engineers. | | Building things is fine, but of course it's not _academic | research_ - which is defined by the creation of game-changing | concepts and philosophical structures, some of which happen to | be mathematical. | impossiblefork wrote: | Cook's theorem was 1971, and I think that's a foundational | result. | | Then there's Hastad's work from the 1980s-2010s on lower | bounds and optimal non-approximability results. | | There's Sanjeev Arora, who was one of the guys who worked on | the PCP theorem and who has now been writing interesting | things about ML. | | There's Razborov and Rudich, with natural proofs, which was | in 1994. | | There's Khot, who would be up with these guys provided that | the UGC is true. | xhkkffbf wrote: | While I do think that some cream makes it to the top, this is | the kind of selection bias that's common in academia. The | professors with tenure love to think that the system is fair. | But even if the filters ensure that the tenured are good, it | doesn't mean that the filtering process isn't excluding a | number of other people who are just as good (or even better). | | There aren't many slots at each level of the pyramid. Many | people are excluded at each stage of the culling. | mikkergp wrote: | > If you create something like what Dijkstra created back in | 56' (undeniable innovation), then no door will remain shut. | That's the beauty of Math, CompSci, or STEM as a whole. | | Don't get me wrong, this seems like a nice idea, I'd love to | live in this world, but hasn't it been disproven time and again | throughout history? This board itself is flooded with engineers | with great ideas being dismissed because of "realities of the | business" or "changing priorities", much less "political | realities" etc et Al. | | In fact I'd say the reality is probably opposite,(as a matter | of principal, obviously great ideas do eventually make it but) | truly great innovative ideas are ignored, it is only the | incremental ideas that don't make anyone uncomfortable that are | accepted. | qzx_pierri wrote: | > This board itself is flooded with engineers with great | ideas being dismissed because of "realities of the business" | or "changing priorities", much less "political realities" etc | | Your argument would be rock solid if those great ideas were | only applicable/useful in huge bureaucratic organizations | (which is the type of environment where bullshit ideas are | given more attention than truly innovative and impactful | ideas). We've all probably been there before, and I get your | point 100%. | | However, the next step would be to go where your ideas can be | heard. And if the idea is good enough, people will listen. | Shouting into an org chart 10 miles deep to narcissistic C | level executives has always seemed like a waste of time. So I | don't disagree with you, but if you aren't being heard, speak | to someone who will listen. | mikkergp wrote: | > However, the next step would be to go where your ideas | can be heard. And if the idea is good enough, people will | listen | | I don't see how your point is in conflict with my point. | You originally said that "no door will remain shut". Your | response seems to be similar to my point is that this is | not in fact true, ideas have to be marketed to the people | who need them or "the right doors". It is not in fact "the | best ideas that will float to the top" by some objective | measure but the most relevant/politically | applicable/subjectively best to the audience" ideas that | will float to the top. | karpierz wrote: | The cream generally rises, sure. | | But at what rate? And how long will they stay in the game | without recognition before giving up? And do those numbers | differ based on your color or where you're from? | qzx_pierri wrote: | > But at what rate? And how long will they stay in the game | without recognition before giving up? And do those numbers | differ based on your color or where you're from? | | If you provide that data, we can continue the conversation. | However, the truths in my original post stand firm. STEM is | an objective field. Sure, there may be issues with equality | of opportunity, but that's outside the scope of my argument. | | Equality of outcome will always be attainable through | personal effort, intelligence, and innovation - But as I said | in my original post, you'll need to be really good. | | Not everyone will be like Hal Abelson, Margaret Hamilton, | Dennis Ritchie, or Richard Stallman. Those people are built | different. Those are the people I'm referring to. It is | literally impossible for them to have ever not been noticed | due to their next level talent and relentlessness. | [deleted] | parasubvert wrote: | I think this is naive and a classic example of a poor | argument, as your statements are unfalsifiable. They're | expressions of faith in the system and in individuals | outside of time and circumstance. | | From my perspective, we have seen a lot of evidence that | STEM is far from an objective field, and has culturally | excluded a lot of talent. I see little evidence that this | sort of talent magically, consistently, will fight through | the cultural barriers. | qzx_pierri wrote: | I'm a black man who grew up in the projects in a single | parent household. Through willpower and dedication, I | made a way. I made a way because skin color doesn't | matter when you have your CCNA at 14, or when you | maintain a Gentoo install at 16, and have a OpenBSD | router in your home built from old computer parts found | in thrift stores. Mind you, these aren't even impressive | achievements, but they were above average for my age | group at the time. | | > STEM is far from an objective field | | I had every excuse to believe that, but I didn't. I'm | definitely biased because I trusted the system and it | worked. Most industries can be exclusive, but STEM is not | one of them. Raw talent seems to be rare, so any talent | is accepted. | | > and has culturally excluded a lot of talent | | You use 'culture' as a point of argument, which is | extremely vague, yet you accuse me of presenting a poor | argument due to unfalsifiable statements? I respect your | point of view, but you have to be fair. | pessimizer wrote: | Claiming that your statements are an unfalsifiable | declaration of faith in the system is not the same as | taking a position that everything is bad and wrong, and | doesn't have to be defended. If the reason you're | speaking is because you want to convince people that the | system is fine, this is one of the vague objections that | your listeners (the people you're trying to convince) | have. | | It's your job to explain how there are no cultural | effects that you can find that affect your thesis, and | that you've examined the ones that people have previously | mentioned. Not the listener's job to be very specific | about their suspicions that cultural factors could have | an effect on your thesis. | | Black man, south side of Chicago, single mother, learned | C at 12 (or 13) on my own. Doesn't qualify me to make | sweeping cultural statements and not be questioned about | them. | parasubvert wrote: | By culture I meant largely what what was discussed in the | OP, but also the gender gap and resulting slant towards | males in the CS field. Though I suppose the racial gap | would also apply. | | I did not mean to get into an argument on particulars of | whether it's possible for talent to break through | regardless of obstacles (a high rejection rate as | discussed in OP, for example), as I figured you had | personal reasons for your stance about the potential for | talent to break through. I didn't feel it was right or | justified to say you were wrong. You may very well be | right, and a part of me hopes you are. I just felt your | argument as posted wasn't strong. | | Ultimately what I'm saying is that we don't have a | reliable model (as used in social science) to determine | what makes high achievements possible. | | I tend not to be fatalist about social systems always | determining the outcomes of individuals, I think | individuals can transcend them and break through the | average result, and we have examples of this such as | yourself. | | I am a white cis male but the son of a single mother / | school teacher and first generation immigrant, and | through a mix of luck, privilege and skill had success | beyond what was expected of me. | | I think breaking through class barriers is doable but I'm | not sure if there's a way to model how to make it | repeatable. Even "talent" is a nebulous term, something | that arguably is rare but is also not measurable. Maybe | it's not rare? | | Mainly I wonder if some folks with great talent get | stopped along the way, and what can be done about it. I | liken it to random extrinsic events - just as a a car | accident cuts a life short, a person with the wrong PhD | advisor or boss can be disillusioned or outcast, or | worse. Just as car accident rates can be mitigated, what | can we do to help nurture people of all walks of life in | STEM? | deanCommie wrote: | Your comment may have been narrowly focused on academia, but I | see the same perspectives being shared about Diversity and | Inclusion in our whole industry. But it's a problem. | | Literally the exact same phrasing has been used to resist | removing Jim Crow laws and civil rights legislation. There was | always someone could point to a black man in America that was | doing just fine without any new laws. | | Let's start with where you're right: You're absolutely right | that if you're in the top 0.1%, hell even the top 1% of any | field, you will do fine. No door will remain shut. Your | comparison point is one of the most esteemed humans in the | history of Computing Science. A person who was awarded one of | the first 6 Turing Awards (The equivalent of the Nobel Prize in | our field). | | At that level of intellect, you could make the claim there is | no discrimination. And you'd be wrong (Let's just talk about | what happened to Alan Turing HIMSELF, and the discrimination he | faced, in spite of the ideas that were so revolutionary they | named the award after him). But let's pretend that you're | right. | | What about the rest of the field? What about the p90 of the | industry - folks who want to succeed, who want to thrive, but | encounter hidden and non-hidden biases. Spend 10 minutes with | any woman in STEM and you'll be filled with stories of subtle | and non-subtle discrimination they encounter. Is it necessary? | I think not. | yodsanklai wrote: | I don't see a "culture of rejection". There's rejection whenever | there's competition and a selection. There are tons of computer | science conferences and not all of them are elitist. Even | mediocre papers get published. Should we have all the submissions | in the world accepted at the top conferences so that no | researcher feels left behind? | eatbitseveryday wrote: | This is a reason I gave up doing systems research. It's full of | cliques and negativity. It became a process whereby we were even | trained to accept this rejection frequency as normal and to | expect retrying for years. You keep submitting a paper and | revising it for months even while working on the next idea (can't | just sit around fixing a paper, PhD work must always continue). | | Rejections also directly impact a student's graduation. No | accepted papers at decent conferences? Delay graduation. It's | grating and unnecessarily stressful. | | After graduation I was unmotivated to continue to bother | publishing because I don't care for this culture. I'm saddened by | it. | | There are positions in industry like at Sandia National Labs | which require regular publication to remain employed. Again, | given good work is done, rejections affect your livelihood. Too | much stress. | | I lost my "spark" thinking the field of CS systems research was | one of exploration and community. It exists, but not as a whole. | | /rant | Test0129 wrote: | I left my PhD in computational geometry for similar reasons. I | was told flat out by my advisor that the chances of me getting | a paper accepted in even a middling journal were low. Not | normally low (as in tough review), but so low because the | entire field is dominated by a handful of very high profile | researchers and mathematicians that essentially gate keep | knowledge on it. | | It was also necessary to publish some papers to even get my | PhD. | | Academia is dead. My biggest most important realization about | learning in the last decade is that my concept of the academic | was backwards. They aren't free thinking at all. It's drama all | the way down. | | I now havent touched really anything in CS research because | this experience completely killed my love for the field, and | advanced learning in general. | marktangotango wrote: | I agree with this sentiment. Although I didn't make it to | even applying to grad programs because the professors at my | uni were very much "what are you going to do for me" in | Thomas Edison invention factory way, when even inquiring | about undergrad research. | | > I now havent touched really anything in CS research because | this experience completely killed my love for the field, and | advanced learning in general. | | I wager you'll come around, out of genuine interest, and when | you want to work on interesting things, you'll run into novel | problems, a lot. But this is sad to me because every few | years I'll come up with something novel, and discover someone | already did a ph.d thesis on it. I feel like I'd be much | further along if I had access to people who really cared | about teaching and pushing the boundaries. | m1117 wrote: | No, theres not! | kazinator wrote: | This one has an easy fix! | | If you're in computing and want to produce garbage that is | accepted anyway, don't write papers: write _software_. | cauefcr wrote: | There are PR reviews worse than the #2 reviewer of most papers, | so it's all about new software or forks, don't even bother | upstreaming. /s | ballenf wrote: | > The emphasis on novelty has deep roots in academic publishing. | It used to be that publishing was expensive, and any repetition | came at the expense of other things that could have been | published. Today, however, publishing is essentially free. | | Requiring novelty shows respect for the readers' time. Paper and | ink costs were never the primary limiting factors (even if the | publishers' claimed otherwise to save face). | | "repetition came at the expense of other things" -- no, | repetition comes at the expense equal to Number of Readers * Time | Wasted on Each non-novel paper. | | If the author just stuck to "novelty is hard to really know" then | it's a much stronger argument. | hiptobecubic wrote: | But without reproducibility the paper is basically worthless. | There's already a crisis of unreproducible work and the strong | novelty bias is basically why. | PuppyTailWags wrote: | I don't think requiring novelty is respect for a reader's time. | I think requiring high quality is respect, even if it is adding | to existing bodies of evidence. Novel drivel is just drivel | regardless of its novelty; it requires high quality analysis | and research for anyone to get any benefit from that newness. | theaeolist wrote: | A clear exposition of an obscure and hard to understand result | is lack of 'respect for readers' time'? How so? | krinchan wrote: | The academic system is completely broken for Computer Science, | and I don't really see a way to fix it. The economic realities of | the field just make it too risky to allow an exceptionally gifted | individual to remain out in the open publishing research that | could potentially destroy your business model. | | Justifying these low acceptance rates as somehow prestigious is | really just creating even more perverse incentives that open the | academia side of Computer Science to further defunding and brain | drain. If you're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from | the private sector you simply cannot refuse. It doesn't matter if | your passion is Academia, they can and will buy you out and own | whatever you're working on. | | This has all led to Computer Science's academia side being | something one _escapes_ rather than something you contribute too. | The "cream" rising to the top is often less genius and more | politically savvy with the right connections on the PC. I'm not | necessarily against a selection bias towards "people skills," but | to do so and continue to pretend PCs are pure meritocracy is | nauseating. | | It just comes back to the fact that the majority of Comp Sci PhDs | have the same story: Halfway into their doctorate program they | became severely disillusioned and started jockeying to just | graduate and land a private sector job that essentially was just | bribe money to keep them from working for the competition. | chasil wrote: | I have never pursued this type of publication, but why on earth | does an "acceptance rate" even exist for these (journal or | conference) publications? | | Why not publish them all? Endorse those that are selected, add | commentary to those with which there is disagreement, but is a | batch inclusion of them all so technically difficult? | ghaff wrote: | Because there is an implied stamp of approval for | publications. | | These days nothing is keeping people from publishing | elsewhere if they want to. | chasil wrote: | If the organization is receiving public funds of any kind, | then they should be _required_ to (electronically) publish | all submissions unless the authors withdraw. | | There has been quite enough censorship and paywalling of | research that my taxes fund. | sgt101 wrote: | The bullshit will wash over everything though - there are | lots of people out there that are not acting in good | faith (ie. Russians) and they will use your suggestion to | claim status for all sorts of wickedness. | bee_rider wrote: | The point of a journal is not for people to express their | feelings, but to provide researchers with a collection of | papers that are, at least, mostly, not garbage. Journals | publish the work of others and farm out the review | process to others, their only real functionality is that | of a gatekeeper. | | Since a good chunk of researchers are funded in part by | the government, I guess most journals would end up having | to follow this "publish everything" requirement (money is | fungible and some of every grant goes to administrative | overhead, so you could argue anything any most | universities touch is funded in part by the government). | | Most publishers publish multiple journals, though, so I | guess they could follow your rule as long as they were | allowed to open up the, for example, "IEEE Journal of | Perpetual Motion Machines And Straightforward Proofs That | P=NP." | dr_hooo wrote: | You are likely not aware of just how much crap gets | submitted for any given conference/journal. | Swizec wrote: | > If you're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from the | private sector you simply cannot refuse | | The average graduation time for my comp sci undergrad in the | mid 2000's in Slovenia was 7.5 years. Because most people got | jobs and forgot to graduate. | | Personally I dropped out when schoolwork started getting in the | way of freelancing for US companies. I remember a moment when | my professor said "You know if you don't get these grades up, | you'll have a hard time finding a job" and I thought "But I | already have a job ... sitting here talking to you is costing | me billable hours" | | Don't get me wrong, I loved studying comp sci and learned a | lot. Even use that knowledge regularly. Just didn't get the | paper. | leoc wrote: | > The economic realities of the field just make it too risky to | allow an exceptionally gifted individual to remain out in the | open publishing research that could potentially destroy your | business model. | | This seems a bit of a stretch, doesn't it? It seems that you | don't have to suppress CS research to prevent it from having an | impact, you can usually just politely ignore it after it has | been published. | g9yuayon wrote: | I saw a list of acceptance rate here: | https://github.com/lixin4ever/Conference-Acceptance-Rate. | | Is 18% or so acceptance rate really low, though? Almost 2 in 10 | submissions are accepted, and I thought "the top" meant | something like 2% or less. | | BTW, is there any resources that catalogs which ideas in papers | may work well in industry? As someone outside of academia, I | find there are simply too many papers, even from top | conferences, for me to consume. It's hard for me to know which | paper's ideas can help me or not, and this 18% acceptance rate | is not a good enough filter any more. | muxamilian wrote: | There's also self selection: You're only going to submit to a | top conference if you think there is a slight chance of your | work being accepted. Thus, one could argue that papers | submitted to top conferences are already better than average. | This means that the acceptance rate is way lower in fact. | caddemon wrote: | Many similar problems exist in most fields of academia. Biology | has an even worse academic environment IMO, but unless you are | highly computational it's not as easy to sell out to industry. | Yeah there's pharma, but the straight out of PhD salaries | aren't that exciting and the work environment is generally not | as good as tech. | | Not disagreeing with you at all on the CS front though | obviously. I am interested to see how things go in the next few | decades in the respective fields, as the ease of exit does | affect who stays as you mention. But it also affects who joins | in the first place, the pressure felt to get results, and | hopefully down the road systemic incentive to fix the problems. | | CS also has the perk of being easier to rejoin - you don't need | to make a huge initial investment in most researchers to give | them a chance. So I'm optimistic for reform in CS academia down | the road. But it's a long road, and if academic politics | continue to prevail then I'm deeply concerned about the state | of all of our research institutions. | | Seriously, I was recently at reunions for a "top" university | where many people go into graduate programs, and it became a | running joke trying to find an alum from any PhD program that | wasn't jaded as fuck. Even some of the people that I was most | confident would be killing it weren't (or at least felt they | weren't). The majority were actively exploring industry | opportunities and considered themselves unlikely to do an | academic postdoc. | logisticseh wrote: | _> The "cream" rising to the top is often less genius and more | politically savvy with the right connections on the PC._ | | I'm generally nauseated when I interact with American CS | academics. Every time I attend a conference, PC, or NSF panel, | I am so glad I chose industry. It's like IRL twitter. | | (Europe seems to be better for some reason.) | | _> If you 're smart enough to rise, you'll get an offer from | the private sector you simply cannot refuse. It doesn't matter | if your passion is Academia, they can and will buy you out and | own whatever you're working on._ | | IME it's less about "offer you can't refuse" on the industry | side and more about "offer you can't take" on the academic | side. | | After 6 years of deferred income I simply could not take a job | that paid $80K-$100K in an HCoL area or $65K-$80K in an LCoL | area. I had loans to pay back, no 401K, and not enough savings | for a down payment. | | If you want good people to stay in CS academia, I think a few | things need to change: | | 1. First, and most importantly, the faculty culture. I don't | really know how to describe the problem, but "the old folks are | checked out and the young folks are Twitter personalities" is | probably close. What's the point of being in academia if you | have to be surrounded by the intellectual equivalent of used | car salesmen, especially when you can go to industry and do | interesting work without the BS? | | 2. Double the income of PhD students so that they aren't | financially ruined by choosing the academic path. This isn't a | super unreasonable request -- they'd still be paid less than | their peers in industry while doing what's effectively a full | time job. | | 3. Pay faculty more. Not a lot more... just, like, "at least | what my undergrad students make at their first job after | graduating". | | I think if you solve items 2 and 3, then item 1 will take care | of itself. | [deleted] | moab wrote: | Should faculty be paid more? Absolutely. Should Ph.D. | students be paid more? Absolutely!! But the blanket statement | you make in (1) is wrong and strikes me as awfully close to | the extreme left-wing and right-wing mindsets of "the system | is fucked up beyond repair, all that remains to be done is to | tear it down". The reality is more nuanced than this, and the | picture you paint of industry is hardly that rosy, even at | silver-spoon companies that invest heavily in R&D. | logisticseh wrote: | I've spent a lot of time with working for or closely | interfacing with a half dozen academic institutions. I left | academia by choice -- with multiple TT offers in hand -- so | this isn't sour grapes. | | I am highly confident in my assessment that the | personalities found on the typical R1 tenure track are | exactly the sort of personalities I avoid hiring or working | with at all costs. There are exceptions, but they prove the | rule (and I can often poach them anyways). | | I don't think I said anything about industry other than | that it pays 3x-5x better than the TT, and I'm pretty darn | confident that's true. I am clear-eyed about the issues in | industry, but the personalities are much better. | | I really do believe that the massive pay disparity between | CS industry and CS academia is, in part, a "toxic | personality that can't play well with others" tax. And I | really do believe that you'd get more mentally/emotionally | healthy people on the TT if it paid better. | | Anyways, we can agree to disagree, because we agree on the | solution in any case. | ackbar03 wrote: | > I am highly confident in my assessment that the | personalities found on the typical R1 tenure track are | exactly the sort of personalities I avoid hiring or | working with at all costs. | | And what is that exactly out of curiosity? | yCombLinks wrote: | My experience working with a former academic that was | awful to work with: Self-absorbed, self-promoting, | accomplished next to nothing but talked a big game, shit | on everything everyone else did, even though their code | ran the business | caddemon wrote: | The pay is not the biggest problem though. Obviously it is | a big one, but there's a huge issue with the work culture. | | I agree it's a rosy picture of industry, but IME most of | the supposed "intellectual freedom" of academia is just a | marketing pitch these days. You don't get there until you | somehow make tenure, and even then if you're in a high cost | field you need to be very high profile if you don't want to | be forced to focus on the topics that award grant money. | You're interested in narcolepsy? Too bad. | | So I consider it a red flag when a PI immediately jumps to | say that "yes salaries should be higher but" and then goes | on to defend everything else about their current situation. | | Like it is ridiculous the amount of self promotion one | feels pressured to do on Twitter. Do you not see the | problem with authors pushing their work on social media | during a supposed double blind review period? | | I don't disagree that there is often a lot of bitching | without actionable suggestions. But I don't think the | characterization in (1) was especially extreme and I don't | see the suggestion to burn the whole system to the ground. | Personally I think we need more diversity in how academic | institutions operate, that doesn't mean that old | institutions will disappear. | JohnClark1337 wrote: | I'm curious where all the money goes, since student loans are | incredibly high but teacher pay is so low. I'm guessing the | answer is 'random nonsense that shouldn't matter'. | thaw13579 wrote: | In my university teaching experience, I found that everyone | up the administrative chain to the top gets a cut, with the | teaching faculty themselves receiving 1-2% of the annual | tuition... | grayclhn wrote: | IDK, I think tenure contributes a lot to 1. I understand and | agree with a lot of the rationale (academic freedom, etc.) | but when you select for people that prioritize, "if I work | really hard for 6 years and get lucky, I can never be fired," | you get a lot of dysfunctional individuals and encourage some | of their worst impulses. | seydor wrote: | the most toxic ... if you exclude all the others | FabHK wrote: | One side effect I didn't see mentioned in the article: | | One professor of mine spoke of the LPU, the least publishable | unit. So, if you're lucky enough to have some novel ideas, and | build something nice out of it, don't put it all into one | coherent and easily digested journal paper! The number of | publications counts. | | Instead, chop it into little pieces that are just "novel" or | noteworthy enough (LPUs), and publish them separately. | Publication list inflation accomplished; and scientific | progress/intelligibility/successful communication be damned. | grayclhn wrote: | Honestly, I think this is often said cynically but is a good | practice overall. Would you rather have to read and understand | one giant commit reflecting 2 years of work, or 10 well- | documented and logically complete individual commits? | blacksmithgu wrote: | The issue is that novel paper ideas will be split across | multiple years (and even multiple conferences), making it | much harder to actually see the whole picture for a reader. | Each little piece of the paper will often also be bloated | with unnecessary extra detail in order to reach the threshold | for "minimum publishable paper". | holidaygoose wrote: | Using the same code analogy as the parent, this is like | code with unnecessary extra commenting. Seems okay to me. | grayclhn wrote: | Splitting up a groundbreaking idea into so many papers that | the idea is lost is 1) going beyond a "minimal publishable | unit" and 2) not in the authors' interest, since getting | credit for a groundbreaking idea in a correspondingly | prestigious outlet is much better than getting credit for 2 | or 3 bad ideas. I'm sure there's a level of novelty where 2 | irrelevant papers is better for the author than 1 single | paper, but I don't think we should design academic | publishing around slightly-better-than-mediocre | contributions. | sgt101 wrote: | A lot of this is caused by the bad faith of some state actors. | | Many computer science conferences are under systematic assault | from these places, which systematically swamp the PC's with | submissions. | | What needs to happen is : | | - Regionalisation; make conferences regional only. So that | submission can only come from that area or small group of | nations. This will reduce travel demands and increase plurality. | | - Sharp constraints on personal submission: one and only one | paper as an author by _anyone_. | | - Block outs : you get in one year, you skip a year. | impendia wrote: | I am an academic mathematician -- who has had job applications | rejected, papers rejected, grant proposals rejected. Not always, | but it's not exactly a rare occurrence. I've also been on the | other side, and it also sucks to reject people. | | It's an unfortunate reality of academia that there are fewer | resources (jobs, grant funding, etc.) available, than there are | researchers who are prepared to put them to good use. | | Further, those who are making the decisions have limited time. If | you're serving on a hiring committee and get hundreds of job | applicants, you can't hope to read all the papers of all the | applicants. To deeply read any _one_ of them would take a fair | bit of time. | | We therefore need a signaling mechanism to distinguish the | outstanding from the merely very good. | | It's of course possible to argue about the details of _how_ | papers are rejected, as the authors indeed do. But unfortunately | the core problem -- an aspiring academic will get rejected often, | and it can be extremely demoralizing -- is one we probably can 't | solve. | logisticseh wrote: | I don't buy the attention filter argument. No one -- and I | really do mean no one -- is going to read the entire contents | of the proceedings of even just one of these conferences. | NeurIPS -- a single CS conference -- is more than twice the | size of the Joint Math Meetings. ICRA and ICML are just as | large or larger, and AAAI isn't far behind. That's just one | sub-field of CS. There are so many papers coming out every year | that I simply cannot keep up with two of my own niches. Adding | more papers to that firehose wouldn't materially change the | situation. | | I've reviewed for some (high quality) Mathematics journals. | Papers tend to be more complete, for sure, but the reviewing is | _much_ less rejectionist. I 'm not aware of any Mathematics | journal with a 10% acceptance rate, and even 20% is probably on | the low end. | | _> It 's an unfortunate reality of academia that there are | fewer resources (jobs, grant funding, etc.) available, than | there are researchers who are prepared to put them to good | use._ | | I don't think this is true in CS. Universities outside of an | elite set really struggle to hire and retain high quality | faculty. It's at a crisis level outside of R1. Teaching- | oriented institutions have mostly have stopped trying to hire | traditional academics; a masters degree with some teaching | experience is sufficient. | | Some of this is due to industry -- high-quality faculty | candidates tend to also have 3x-5x offers in industry, and it's | hard to turn down a guaranteed early retirement for the grind | and uncertainty of the tenure track. But I think some of it is | also that students who would make good teachers and mentors | lose confidence due to a series of unnecessary paper rejections | and decide to nope out of academia. | | Again, I spend _a lot_ of time around academic mathematics. The | rejectionist culture in CS is real. And not just conferences, | btw. An NSF program manager started my last review panel by | telling us that scores are consistently way lower in CS than in | any other field and to please chill out. | impendia wrote: | Interesting. Seems my experiences in math extrapolate less | well than I'd imagined. | thomaslangston wrote: | What does R1 mean in this context? | logisticseh wrote: | Universities that offer doctoral degrees and have "Very | High Research Activity" according to the Carnegie | Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. | | Specifically, the 130 or so institutions listed here: https | ://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_research_universities_... | | Heuristically, think "major private universities and | flagship public universities". | [deleted] | magpi3 wrote: | Academia as a whole is such an interesting place. I value it | highly because I value learning. I love school, I loved the | conversations and deep dives into interesting waters that | nourished me in both college and graduate school, and I loved the | opportunity to be fully immersed, without needing to get a job, | in an atmosphere of learning. | | But the rest of it? The petty hierarchies, the papers born of | countless hours of hard work by extremely talented people that | few people will ever read, the wage labor of adjuncts, the | elitism, the comfortable cowardice of tenure - that all should be | burned in fire. | | I once read a book - I wish I could remember its name - that | noted that even though we live in a democratic republic fueled by | at least somewhat meritocratic capitalism, institutions from the | feudal era still exist, the most notable being the church and the | university. That was eye opening when I read it, and to this day | it has jaded my view of academia and the people who tether | themselves to it. All of those noble, high minded academics, | fighting for their place in a feudal structure that they don't | dare challenge. I know I sound a bit like an asshole when I write | this, but: I can't truly look up to anyone who would resign | themselves to a structure like that. | bo1024 wrote: | If the last paragraph is your perspective on being a pawn in an | academic structure, I would love to hear what you think of | being a pawn in a corporation. | magpi3 wrote: | I suppose a big enough corporation can feel the same, at | least in terms of internal politics, but the difference for | me is the tenure (well-paid, almost impossible to fire) and | adjunct (close to minimum wage, no health insurance, | completely disposable) dynamics. Indefensible. And I think | the people with tenure don't object to this model simply | because they enjoy their privilege. | blacksmithgu wrote: | Not OP, but at at least most corporate pawns are cynically | aware of how artificial the system is and that you need to | play games to get ahead (or just coast along if you don't | care). Academia has a luster of meritocracy when in reality | you need to game things just as hard to become successful. | kmmlng wrote: | I think it's not surprising that conferences have to perform some | selection. You need the right amount of participants and talks. | If a high rejection rate achieves the right amount, it is hard to | argue against it. | | But why are publications tied to conference attendance anyways? | Sure, there also journals, but submitting to a journal tends to | be an especially slow process. If you are in a fast-paced field, | submitting to a journal is a dangerous game. | | Why can we not just upload our papers to something like arxiv and | then give people the option to vote on papers analogous to reddit | submissions, so that promising stuff organically rises to the | top. That way it would at least be based on the opinions of a | sizable number of judges, not just three preselected peers. | | Oh no, but what about peer review. What about it? Is it difficult | to get past peer review at a top conference? Yes. Is it difficult | to get past peer review in general? No. You can publish anything | you want already, you will just have to jump through senseless | hoops to do it. Why not skip the hoops and just upload it | somewhere? We can still have journals and conferences that select | high quality material from the uploaded papers and it will be an | honour to be featured in one of those. You can still use features | at conferences and journals as a bad metric to judge the quality | of researchers, but the actual publishing will be decoupled from | these institutions. | Eridrus wrote: | ArXiv is fine for what it does, but it does not provide any | sort of dissemination support. | | IMO the best thing about CS conferences is the poster track | where you can walk by hundreds of posters, and the information | is (when done well) much more easily digestible than papers, | and you get to ask questions, and these are nowhere near their | limits. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-08-26 23:01 UTC)