As you have seen in the post (did you read it, dear reviewer?), references on the first page where unhelpful, so 1) comes already with a caveat.
And so on.
I think the social game view is at this point entirely justified, and there is nothing cynical about it. And no, academia does not still work.
A given "structure" is also ridiculous, and part of the problem. Once you care more about the form than the content, form is what prevails.
The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it.
> The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it.
Reviewing dynamics make this hard. There is little to no reward for reviewers, and it is much easier to write a long and bad paper than it is to review it carefully (and LLMs have upset this balance even further). To suggest that every submitted paper should occupy several weeks of expert attention is to fundamentally misunderstand how many crappy papers are getting submitted.
And so on.
I think the social game view is at this point entirely justified, and there is nothing cynical about it. And no, academia does not still work.
A given "structure" is also ridiculous, and part of the problem. Once you care more about the form than the content, form is what prevails.
The truth is: To understand a paper properly, you need to deal with it properly, not just the 5 minutes it takes to skim the first pages and make up your opinion there already. Fifteen pages is short enough, and if you cannot commit to properly review this, for a week or so of dedicated study, just don't review it. We would all be better off for it.