> I also was infuriated when I got a review saying 'you didn't explain structure from motion' in a conference with a topic on structure from motion. But the reality is this. If I want my papers to be read, I must adapt to my audience.

Honestly, I hate this take. I don’t think it’s good for science or academia. Papers do not need be readable to everyone. The point is to be readable by other experts in your niche. Otherwise, I don’t know who to write to, and that’s exactly the same problem the parent is having.

Writing to too broad of an audience also makes papers unnecessarily long. You have to spend more time motivating the work and more time on the background. This has spinoff effects where reviewers can demand you cite them, contributing to the citation mining nightmare. I’ve seen 8 page papers with 100+ references (the paper I referenced has 78). This is more what we expect from a survey paper. When background sections are minimal you can’t justify asking unless you are critical to the exact problem being solved.

Every paper rewrite is time and money that should be better spent on research or other activities. Every rewrite is an additional submission into the next conference. I don’t think labs are submitting 20+ papers per round because they wrote 20 papers in that 3 months (with some exceptions) but rather because they wrote a bunch and are recycling works from the previous few years. This increases reviewer load as well.

The question then is how people enter a topic. Truth be told, I don’t think it’s any easier than when papers had under 30. For reference, that one Cybenko paper we all know has under 30 references but is 10.5 pages. What I think we should do instead is allow citing of blogs and encourage people to write tutorials. I think this would actually be a really useful task for 2nd and 3rd year PhD students. You learn a lot when writing those things and that’s the stage where you should be entering expert level at your niche. The problem is that we have no incentivize to do any of the other critical tasks in academia. This is why I personally hate it. We are hyper focused on this novelty thing but in reality that doesn’t exist and is highly subjective. It just encourages obscurification, which we’ve routinely seen from high profile labs.

We work in ML, how are we not all keenly aware of reward hacking and knock-on effects?! I honestly think the fact that we cannot get our house in order is evidence that we can’t safely build safe AGI yet. This is certainly magnitudes easier of a task, not to mention has significant reward (selfishly, it highly benefits us too!). Everyone feels that something is off but no one wants to do anything about it. We’ve only implemented half added measures that are more about signaling. Can’t let an LLM review for you? But the author is responsible for proving the reviewer used one? We’re all ML experts… we all know this isn’t possible except in the most cases. It’s as if you got shot while blindfolded and the police won’t investigate until you bring them evidence of who shot you and with what kind of gun. It shouldn’t matter if a review is bad because it was written by an LLM or because it was by a human. Just like it shouldn’t matter if you were shot or stabbed.

> The maths are not important, the important thing is the insight you give to the readers.

I also hate this take. The math often __is__ the insight. I agree that a lot of papers have needless math (look at any diffusion paper or any paper with attention copy pasting the same equations). But other works need them. The reason to use math is the same reason we program. If there was an easier way to communicate, we would (note: math isn’t just symbols, it can be words too). Math and programming are hard because they are languages that are precise and dense. The precision is important when communicating. Yes, it might take longer to parse but it is unambiguous when interpreted (it is also easier to parse when you’re trained and in the habit. Just like any other language).

I think we lost our way in academia. We got caught up in by excitement. We let the bureaucrats take too much control and dictate the universities. We got lost in our egos (definitely not new) and too focused on prestige and fame. Our systems should be fighting these things, not enabling or encouraging them. Yes, the people at the top benefit from these systems, but the truth is that even they benefit from fixing things.