Guitar Theory

[Eduardo Ochs]

Fonte do comentário:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454763 ACM Is Now Open Access (acm.org) ->
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46455341

O comentário em si:


I was in academia for only a few years. I did a lot of reviewing (one
of the chores for graduate students). I don't know what to say, here;
there needs to be an economically based gate keeper for publication &
review. Otherwise you'll get spammed by hundreds (per graduate
student) of crazy-people papers. I was in a niche PL subfield (generic
programming in the mid-2000s), and there was this one guy I called
"guitar dude" that kept submitting PL papers using "guitar theory".
The basis of the theory was an "algorithm" he developed to determine
if a number was prime in O(1) (constant!!?) time in the size of the
number. He was by far the most determined; he had a "swap" scam he ran
to get his papers in. OTOH, submissions to the editor (my PI) numbered
in the THOUSANDS, and we only had, like, 35 attendees at GPCE? I can't
imagine what Nature or Science have to deal with.

I don't know how submission works for non-Western subsidized
countries; but, just wading through the pre-AI submission process was
a 50+-hour a week job for one, tiny, niche conference. Making the cost
$1000 cuts that down by at least 2 orders of magnitude.

On the flip side ... paying the reviewers just seems like a bad idea?
Reviewers need to be skeptical AF. Even the best scientists can throw
out turds every now and then.

  [[]], Eduardo