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99 pointssavara22 comments

The author's expanded definition of "weak accept" is perfect.

I'm in a different area of CS. I've had reviews where the reviewer clearly skimmed over the math details. Still, the totally blank reviews in this article would not be accepted by program chairs in my area. They would find a new reviewer or ask the original reviewer to try again.

Peer reviewing is considered duty to the academy but isn't tracked, publicized, or taken into account in e.g. lateral transfers, summer grants, or other things professors might want, right?

Is it harder to get a paper published in a given journal if you've blown off requests from them to peer review or done a crap job?

Suppose postdoc X submits a terrible review to a conference. Conference committee member Y requested the review from X, and thus learns that X is a bad reviewer. Later on, Y's colleague Z is considering hiring X for a faculty position and asks Y about X. Y tells the story about the terrible review. X doesn't get the job.

In my experience, reviews are typically anonymous.

In my experience with CS conferences, reviewers are rarely anonymous to anyone involved except the authors.

Yes for the paper authors, but what about the committee member who allocates reviewers to papers? Are they converted into "Reviewer 1", etc.? I wouldn't know, I have never been on a conference/journal committee.

This is great: "This is no ordinary adversary that you would expect to face in an academic review. This person sits in the chaotic neutral section of the d&d morality compass."

Though it's expecting the audience to know what that means. I would expect that a greater number of them would understand it than in the general population but I would think there'd be plenty who don't.

FWIW, I'm quite aware of what d&d is but I don't know what "chaotic neutral" means.

I didn't know it either, so ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alignment_(Dungeons_%26_Dragon...

A chaotic neutral character is an individualist who follows their own heart and generally shirks rules and traditions. Although chaotic neutral characters promote the ideals of freedom, it is their own freedom that comes first; good and evil come second to their need to be free.

Its the morality (alignment) system of dnd; lawful nuetral and chaotic on the x, good nuetral and evil on the y.

The y represents what you trend towards (good v evil decisions) and the y represents the degree by which you do so.

So chaotic nuetral implies that you're generally nuetral, but its unpredictable when you'll make a good or evil decision (ie the reviewer somewhat arbitrarily lets you go on a non-critical mistake)

It is a two word summary of the following two paragraphs:

They join program committees for conferences, but they have a maniacal distaste for the peer reviewing system. There have been too many missed opportunities at the hands of ill-justified criticisms. They care so little for the process that they will actively try to sabotage it. They roll a d6 for each review and assign it the corresponding score. I was lucky this time, but many others haven't been.

Usually, they take great pleasure in writing an incomprehensible review with no relation to the text they've read. But today is different, they only have one review to write. They rolled an accept, now the dungeon master exposes their bidding.

You would not ordinarily expect a chaotic neutral in academia. Academia is very bureaucratic, which fits with a Lawful alignment. A chaotic neutral character isn't even going to pretend to care about the rules. It makes you wonder how the hell they have remained in the system this long when they are so obviously phoning it in with no effort and no pretense at making at effort. It is such an obvious fuck you and your damn rules attitude, it is incomprehensible how they have failed to get fired.

I once considered classifying road users using that taxonomy, for self-driving car purposes. A bike messenger is a chaotic neutral. They don't obey the rules of the road, but are trying to avoid collisions.

I don't work in academia, but at my current workplace, we've removed the "Neutral" rating in our interview feedback system. You're required to pick a side, and you need to back up your position. If you really can't form a recommendation, the candidate has to do another interview (I haven't personally seen this happen).

That said, we also are able to set a maximum # of interviews per week that we will accept, and our time is respected. Perhaps the same cannot be said for peer review in academia.

It's one of the worst feelings for me when I give a talk or present a paper, get to the Q&A portion, and I'm met with crickets.

> It's one of the worst feelings for me when I give a talk or present a paper, get to the Q&A portion, and I'm met with crickets.

If you know anyone in the crowd, it's a good idea to 'seed' the crowd with prepared questions or ask friends to kick off the q&a portion with a question of their own. We do this when we have guest speakers and it greatly improves the moral of the speakers and everyone goes home happier.

I thought this was a standard. I have been seeing this in play since highschool guest speaker sessions

> That said, we also are able to set a maximum # of interviews per week that we will accept, and our time is respected. Perhaps the same cannot be said for peer review in academia.

It absolutely isn't. Until you get tenure, you have to remove the word "no" from your vocabulary.

Of course, lots of public academics will say exactly the opposite, that you have to carefully and strategically choose what you say yes to, and give only one or two efforts your all. The hypocrisy! No one in modern academia can afford to do this! Look at the track record of the people that give you this advice - they all spread themselves paper-thin across eight or ten institutional collaborations, doing exactly just enough to get their name on something and then moving on.

That's the game, because that's what you get rewarded for, because that's what the system measures. Don't hate the player.