> I would think if the point of a confidential review is for you to do anonymous work to improve someone else's credited workThis is one outcome of peer review, and is an explicit goal of (good) peer reviewers. But it's definitely not the main goal of peer review. The main goal of peer review is assessment. Improvement is something that you can strive for as a secondary outcome, but it's not the main point.
This is a significant and important contrast with code review. Peer review is NOT analogous to code review!
NB: The code review style of improvement-focused review also happens in academia! But it happens within groups rather than between groups. I.e., advisors or post-docs in single research group or university critiquing one another's work will behave more like a code review. Peer review is different.
The same is true in industry, btw. Think of peer review as the thing that happens when a regulator reviews the code from a medical device. They're not interested in making pull requests and doing your work for you. Although they do in principle want you to succeed in your goals, and might provide some feedback along those lines, they're making a yes/no decision. Different function.
> their work was improved by incorporating your feedback, you would be happy with the outcome
There are really two concerns here:
1. confidentiality, and
2. plagiarism.
The first item is probably more important than the second. The typical expectation of reviews is that they are anonymous and private unless stated otherwise (eg openreview). It's incredibly bad form to publish a private correspondence without first asking for permission.
Copying a reviewer verbatim without permission is plagiarism, but it's not really something that anyone actually cares about, per se. I've sometimes asked for permission to incorporate components of reviews verbatim into my papers, and never received anything except enthusiastic "of course". I assume the same would be true in the case above. But even in those cases I say something like: "as helpfully observed by an anonymous reviewer of this paper, [insert quote]".
The key point is that I don't go around publishing explicitly confidential correspondences without permission.
> or else why are you participating in a confidential review process in the first place?
Exactly. Confidential.
Again, surely you can see how publishing someone's confidential words is quite rude, even if the person wouldn't mind those words being published if simply asked.
> Like I said, I'm not trying to be fair and don't have the right background to be fair to you. I only speak up because I grew up in an academic family and know that there is a presumption that academic work is more idealistic, more altruistic, and less mercenary than private sector work, and I think it's worth pointing out when the reverse is true.
Academic work is all of those things in terms of goals, not necessarily in terms of process. I don't know anyone who has a passing familiarity with Academia and doesn't realize that it is incredibly competitive.
Altruism and competition are different axes.