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I am a simple man. When ever I see the words "Toxic Culture" spoken by people somehere, I flee the country..
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?
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
He is referring to Goering.
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?
> 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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is referring to Goering.
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?
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.
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)
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.
I am a simple man. When ever I see the words "Toxic Culture" spoken by people somehere, I flee the country..
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.