Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The culture of rejection in computer science publications

sigbed.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 172 posts

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#71

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #19

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 need…

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.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#72

Post by xhkkffbf »

evouga wrote: post #37
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #17

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). T…

Please no. Good science is often boring; this system prioritizes hype and marketing over everything else.

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.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#73

Post by theaeolist »

snickerbockers wrote: post #44

>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?

Program Committee

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#74

Post by pessimizer »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #53
parasubvert wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 f…

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.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#75

Post by xhkkffbf »

Adiqq wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#76

Post by JohnClark1337 »

logisticseh wrote: post #41
krinchan wrote: post #39

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 t…

> 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 s…

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'.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#77

Post by Athas »

xhkkffbf wrote: post #69
Athas wrote: post #2

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 a…

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.

Modern journals don't actually print all that much, and I'd expect the marginal cost of publishing additional papers to be very low.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#78

Post by xhkkffbf »

qzx_pierri wrote: post #19

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 need…

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.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#79

Post by caddemon »

moab wrote: post #60
logisticseh wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

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…

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.

Re: The culture of rejection in computer science publications

#80

Post by marktangotango »

Test0129 wrote: post #52
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #9

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’…

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 paper…

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.

Post reply on HN