Great Moments in Self-Rationalization

Matthew J. X. Malady writes

I decided to start the experiment at midnight on Thursday, December 31st. I’d ring in the New Year by logging off, then not use my phone, my computer, or any social media for a full seventy-two hours, coming back online at midnight on Sunday, January 3rd. 

... 

At the end of the experiment, I wasn’t dying to get my phone back or to access Facebook. I just wanted to get back to being better informed. My devices and the Internet, as much as they are sometimes annoying and frustrating and overflowing with knuckleheads, help me to do that. If getting outside and taking walks, or sitting in silence, or walking dogs, or talking with loved ones on the phone got me to that same place, I’d be more than happy to change things up.

You would have a hard time convincing me that "better informed" does not really mean "constantly stimulated."

The Strange Effects of Peer Review

Daniel Lemire writes

If you have not been subject to peer review, it might be hard to understand how peer comments can slow down researchers so much… and even discourage entire lines of research. To better understand the process… imagine that you have to convince four strangers of some result… and the burden is entirely on you to convince them… and if only just one of them refuses to accept your argument, for whatever reason, he may easily convince an editor to reject your work… The adversarial referee does not even have to admit he does not believe your result, he can simply say benign things like “they need to run larger or more complicated experiments”. In one project I did, one referee asked us to redo all the experiments in a more realistic setting. So we did. Then he complained that they were not extensive enough. We extended them. By that time I had invested months of research on purely mundane tasks like setting up servers and writing data management software… then the referee asked for a 100x extension of the data sizes… which would have implied a complete overhaul of all our work. I wrote a fifteen-page rebuttal arguing that no other work had been subjected to such levels of scrutiny in the recent past, and the editor ended up agreeing with us. 

Your best strategy in such case might be to simply “give up” and focus on producing “uncontroversial” results. So there are research projects that neither I nor many other researchers will touch…

 To quote an anonymous reviewer on a recent paper I submitted:  “The simulation system is too small. The algorithm should be tested on a larger system.”