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Comment by southstreet | Hacker News Reader

"feedback" here seems to refer to feedback on the scientific paper that is being retracted, not personal performance feedback or anything like that. When I red this first, wasn't immediately clear what this was about.

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Good point, that also took a bit of disentangling for me.

As such, I find it really quite baffling that someone would be unwilling to share that scientific feedback with her, or who raised it.

She has a history of attacking people through social media. If I were reviewing her paper, I would certainly not want to be known to her, especially if I were critical of it. The possibility of retaliation from her is very real and she often uses her considerable twitter following to do exactly that. I believe she thinks she's doing the right thing, but from a disinterested party's perspective she seems like a bully.

Hello! I just wanted to point out that she addressed your point: https://twitter.com/AkhandBharat365/status/13349035240066088...

I remembered your comment here, so I came back to post this, for what it's worth.

I'm still not entirely sure what to think.

Some refereeing processes are anonymous, and there can be good reasons for that, like preventing academic logrolling. It's standard in academia.

I'm well aware of that. But this was not a (submission) peer review situation. From everything I've seen (not a complete picture of course) this was a process entirely separate from the peer review process of the conference she was submitting to. That still makes it a situation where her paper was apparently reviewed (and possibly by peers) but it certainly doesn't have the same semantics in which anonymity is warranted/guaranteed.

But the feedback itself wasn't shared with her. That part doesn't make sense unless management didn't want her to see it, and why would that be the case?

Because (a) by the rules of engagement, management is not required to share original feedback, and (b) the original feedback could be used to identify the sources. In this case, there might have been a real risk to the sources given the individual in question is known to mobilize internal and external forces like Twitter mobs to personally attack people and bully them into submission.

I think this argument would stand on its own without the very specific claims about the person in question, which are a little strong unless you have personal information.

This is internal legal review, not academic peer review.

I'm not sure we know exactly what kind of review it is. I think it also depends what she signed up for, explicitly or implicitly. What were the expectations around freedom to publish?

It is a review that every paper submitted to a conference or a journal from Google has to go through. In fact I believe one has to do that prior to even submitting the paper to external peer review. That at least was the interpretation every researcher I knew at Google was operating under.

Because she goes on unhinged rants and smears people by calling them racists, probably. Nobody wants to stick their hand in that hornets nest.

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