A Dishonest, Indifferent, and Toxic Culture

I'm gonna get enemies for that ....

But let's face it: the Academia peer review process is pretty rotten.

- Many organisations could not care less about whatever crap you publish as long as you publish. And if possible a lot.

- Many journal's reviewers are friend of friends and you can often easily guess their names, even in double blinded review.

- Many reviewers care more about you quoting their own paper than giving any relevant feedback.

- There is plenty "pay2publish" journals that care about quantity not quality that are commonly used by academia to "force" validate crappy researches/PHds

- The publishing world is full of oversized-ego individuals that will destroy a paper just because it comes from a competing lab/department/professor and not because it is scientifically irrelevant.

And that is only a little subset of the problems...

The sheer amount of typos here is....challenging. And I'm not one to pick on someone who's doing their best to communicate in a second language or anything but shoot this really could've used a copy editor.

> Why fake something like that? Either the paper is ignored, or someone implements it and finds it doesn't work.

The "formal" academic world does not care one bit about stuff working or not. It's all about self-promotion, papers and meaningless academic rituals and procedures.

(And it's even worse outside of the US let me put it that way)

As someone with a little experience in ML research, I feel like outside of the top 5-10 conferences, there rarely is a code repo [1]. I think an even bigger issue is that even when a repo is provided, it's often poorly documented, contains dead links, or _hard to reproduce on other machines_ without code-wrangling.

Tangentially related, even popular repos can have implementations of models that differ from the paper cited. So, who knows how far errors can propagate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[1] - https://www.guide2research.com/topconf/

I want to express sympathies in a particular way:

When I had a job I didn’t want, in a city i didn’t want, no kids, no wife, and prospects abounding, it was easy to speak truth to power. I did it, and I was right technically, businesswise, and morally. What a win...(?)

Now, I have my dream job, my dream location, my own damn house, and my family. -Whole thing feels like a dream I might wake up from if I am not careful... and I feel totally weighed down when it comes to speaking up in a way I would have never countenanced a few years ago.

All that to say, this poor kid... I can only imagine the incentive structures that led him to choose this route, but I know academia being f’ed is a big part of it, and it ticks me off.