[HN Gopher] Terence Tao: One of my papers got declined today
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Terence Tao: One of my papers got declined today
Author : GavCo
Score : 279 points
Date : 2025-01-01 19:12 UTC (3 hours ago)
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(TXT) w3m dump (mathstodon.xyz)
| remoquete wrote:
| I find it refreshing when researchers disclose their own
| failures. Science is made of negative results, errors, and
| rejections, though it's often characterized in a much different,
| unrealistic way.
|
| By the way, even though some of you may know about it, here's the
| link to the Journal of Negative Results: https://www.jnr-
| eeb.org/index.php/jnr
| amichail wrote:
| Sure, even top mathematicians have paper rejections.
|
| But I think the more important point is that very few people are
| capable of publishing papers in top math journals.
| jraph wrote:
| I was confused by the title because paper rejection is incredibly
| common in research, but that's the point and one of the goals is
| to fight imposter syndrome.
|
| It's a good initiative. Next step: everybody realizes that
| researchers are just random people like everybody. Maybe that
| could kill any remaining imposter syndrome.
|
| A rejection, although common, is quite tough during your PhD
| though, even ignoring the imposter syndrome, because in a short
| time, you are expected to have a bunch of accepted papers, in
| prestigious publications if possible. It feels like a rejection
| slows you down, and the clock is still ticking. If we could kill
| some of this nefarious system, that'd be good as well.
| bisby wrote:
| It's especially important coming from someone like Terence Tao.
| If one of the best and brightest mathematicians out there can
| get a paper declined, then it can happen to literally anyone.
| arrowsmith wrote:
| It's noteworthy because it's from Terence Tao, regarded by many
| as the world's greatest living mathematician.
|
| If you read the full post he's making the exact same point as
| you: it's common and normal to get a paper rejected even if
| you're Terence Tao, so don't treat a rejection like the end of
| the world.
| jonathan_landy wrote:
| I guess it is nice to know that he is also not perfect. But
| it's still the case that his accomplishments outshine my own,
| so my imposter syndrome remains intact.
| 2-3-7-43-1807 wrote:
| terence tao is suffering from imposter syndrome? if anything,
| imposter syndrome is suffering from terence tao ... do you
| maybe not know who terence tao is?
| tinktank wrote:
| I wish I has an IQ that high...
| revskill wrote:
| IQ means interesting questions.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| If you want to become smarter in math, read and attempt to
| understand brutally hard math papers and textbooks. Torture
| yourself harder than any time before in your life. :-)
| abetusk wrote:
| The second post in that thread is gold:
|
| """
|
| ... I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing the result
| with an "epsilon loss" in a key parameter. We submitted to a
| highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on the grounds that
| it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we submitted
| elsewhere, and the paper was accepted.
|
| The following year, we managed to finally prove the full
| conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try
| submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the
| paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the
| previous literature!
|
| ...
|
| """
| YouWhy wrote:
| While I'm not a mathematician, I think such an attitude on
| behalf of the journal does not encourage healthy community
| dynamics.
|
| Instead of allowing the community to join forces by breaking up
| a larger problem into pieces, it encourages siloing and camper
| mentality.
| abetusk wrote:
| I agree. This is also a lack of effort on the journal's part
| to set expectations of what the reviewers should be looking
| for in an accepted paper.
|
| In the journal's defense though, what most likely happened is
| that the reviewers were different between submissions and
| they didn't know about the context. Ultimately, I think, this
| type of rejection comes down to the mostly the reviewers
| discretion and it can lead to this type of situation.
|
| I cut off the rest of the post but Tao finished it with this:
|
| """
|
| ... Being an editor myself, and having had to decline some
| decent submissions for a variety of reasons, I find it best
| not to take these sorts of rejections personally,
|
| ...
|
| """
| asah wrote:
| Non-zero failure rate is indeed often optimal because it provides
| valuable feedback toward finding the optimal horizon for various
| metrics, e.g. speed, quality, LPU[1], etc.
|
| That said, given the labor involved in academic publishing and
| review, the optimal rejection rate should be quite low, i.e. find
| a lower cost way to pre-filter papers. OTOH, the reviewers may
| get value from rejected papers...
|
| [1] least publishable unit
| dwaltrip wrote:
| Hilarious irony:
|
| > With hindsight, some of my past rejections have become amusing.
| With a coauthor, I once almost solved a conjecture, establishing
| the result with an "epsilon loss" in a key parameter. We
| submitted to a highly reputable journal, but it was rejected on
| the grounds that it did not resolve the full conjecture. So we
| submitted elsewhere, and the paper was accepted.
|
| > The following year, we managed to finally prove the full
| conjecture without the epsilon loss, and decided to try
| submitting to the highly reputable journal again. This time, the
| paper was rejected for only being an epsilon improvement over the
| previous literature!
| bradleyjg wrote:
| This seems reasonable?
|
| Suppose the full result is worth 7 impact points, which is
| broken up into 5 points for the partial result and 2 points for
| the fix. The journal has a threshold of 6 points for
| publication.
|
| Had the authors held the paper until they had the full result,
| the journal would have published it, but neither part was
| significant enough.
|
| Scholarship is better off for them not having done so, because
| someone else might have gotten the fix, but the journal seems
| to have acted reasonably.
| remus wrote:
| > This seems reasonable?
|
| In some sense, but it does feel like the journal is missing
| the bigger picture somewhat. Say the two papers are A and B,
| and we have A + B = C. The journal is saying they'll publish
| C, but not A and B!
| cubefox wrote:
| ... A and B separately.
| Nevermark wrote:
| How many step papers before a keystone paper seems
| reasonable to you?
|
| I suspect readers don't find it as exciting to read partial
| result papers. Unless there is an open invitation to
| compete on its completion, which would have a purpose and
| be fun. If papers are not page turners, then the journal is
| going to have a hard time keeping subscribers.
|
| On the other hand, publishing a proof of a Millennium
| Problem as several installments, is probably a fantastic
| idea. Time to absorb each contributing result. And the
| suspense!
|
| Then republish the collected papers as a signed special
| leather limited series edition. Easton, get on this!
| slow_typist wrote:
| Publishing partial results is always an invitation to
| compete in the completion, unless the completion is
| dependent on special lab capabilities which need time and
| money to acquire. There is no need to literally invite
| anyone.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| I don't think that's a useful way to think about this,
| especially when theres so little information provided about
| this. Reviewing is a capricious process.
| tux3 wrote:
| If people thought this way - internalizing this publishing
| point idea - it would incentivize sitting on your incremental
| results, fiercely keeping them secret if and until you can
| prove the whole bigger result by yourself. However long that
| might take.
|
| If a series of incremental results were as prestigious as
| holding off to bundle them people would have reason to
| collaborate and complete each other's work more eagerly.
| Delaying an almost complete result for a year so that a
| journal will think it has enough impact point seems
| straightforwardly net bad, it slows down both progress &
| collaboration.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| The big question here is if journal space is a limited
| resource. Obviously it was at one point.
|
| Supposing it is, you have to trade off publishing these
| incremental results against publishing someone else's
| complete result.
|
| What if it had taken ten papers to get there instead of
| two? For a sufficiently important problem, sure, but the
| interesting question is at a problem that's interesting
| enough to publish complete but barely.
| parpfish wrote:
| The limiting factor isn't journal space, but attention
| among the audience. (In theory) the journals publishing
| restrictions help to filter and condense information so
| the audience is maximally informed given that they will
| only read a fixed amount
| btilly wrote:
| Journal space is not a limited resource. Premium journal
| space is.
|
| That's because every researcher has a hierarchy of
| journals that they monitor. Prestigious journals are read
| by many researchers. So you're essentially competing for
| access to the limited attention of many researchers.
|
| Conversely, publishing in a premium journal has more
| value than a regular journal. And the big scientific
| publishers are therefore in competition to make sure that
| they own the premium journals. Which they have multiple
| tricks to ensure.
|
| Interestingly, their tricks only really work in science.
| That's because in the humanities, it is harder to
| establish objective opinions about quality. By contrast
| everyone can agree in science that _Nature_ generally has
| the best papers. So attempting to raise the price on a
| prestigious science journal, works. Attempting to raise
| the price on a prestigious humanities journal, results in
| its circulation going down. Which makes it less
| prestigious.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Two submission in medium reputation journal does not have
| significantly lower prestige than one in high reputation
| journal.
| chongli wrote:
| The reasonable thing to do here is to discourage all of
| your collaborators from ever submitting anything to that
| journal again. Work with your team, submit incremental
| results to journals who will accept them, and let the picky
| journal suffer a loss of reputation from not featuring some
| of the top researchers in the field.
| gwerbret wrote:
| > If people thought this way - internalizing this
| publishing point idea - it would incentivize sitting on
| your incremental results, fiercely keeping them secret if
| and until you can prove the whole bigger result by
| yourself. However long that might take.
|
| This is exactly what people think, and exactly what
| happens, especially in winner-takes-all situations. You end
| up with an interesting tension between how long you can
| wait to build your story, and how long until someone else
| publishes the same findings and takes all the credit.
|
| A classic example in physics involves the discovery of the
| J/ps particle [0]. Samuel Ting's group at MIT discovered it
| first (chronologically) but Ting decided he needed time to
| flesh out the findings, and so sat on the discovery and
| kept it quiet. Meanwhile, Burton Richter's group at
| Stanford also happened upon the discovery, but they were
| less inclined to be quiet. Ting found out, and (in a spirit
| of collaboration) both groups submitted their papers for
| publication at the same time, and were published in the
| same issue of _Physical Review Letters_.
|
| They both won the Nobel 2 years later.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J/psi_meson
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Wait, how did they both know that they both discovered
| it, but only after they had both discovered it?
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| People talk. The field isn't that big.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Gauss did something along these lines and held back
| mathematical progress by decades.
| slow_typist wrote:
| Don't know much about publishing in maths but in some
| disciplines it is clearly incentivised to create the
| biggest possible number of papers out of a single research
| project, leading automatically to incremental publishing of
| results. I call it atomic publishing (from Greek atomos -
| indivisible) since such a paper contains only one result
| that cannot be split up anymore.
| hanche wrote:
| Or cheese slicer publishing, as you are selling your
| cheese one slice at a time. The practice is usually
| frowned upon.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Science is almost all incremental results. There's far more
| incentive to get published now than there is to "sit on" an
| incremental result hoping to add to it to make a bigger
| splash.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Hyper focusing on a single journal publication is going to
| lead to absurdities like this. A researcher is judged by
| the total delta of his improvements, at least by his peers
| and future humanity. (the sum of all points, not the max).
| bennythomsson wrote:
| To supply a counter viewpoint here... The opposite is the
| "least publishable unit" which leads to loads and loads of
| almost-nothing results flooding the journals and other
| publication outlets. It would be hard to keep up with all
| that if there wasn't a reasonable threshold. If anything
| then I find that threshold too low currently, rather than
| too high. The "publish or perish" principle also pushes
| people that way.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| I agree this is reasonable from the individual publisher
| standpoint. I once received feedback from a reviewer that I
| was "searching for the minimum publishable unit", and in some
| sense the reviewer was right -- as soon as I thought the
| result could be published I started working towards the
| publication. A publisher can reasonably resist these kinds of
| papers, as you're pointing out.
|
| I think the impact to scholarship in general is less clear.
| Do you immediately publish once you get a "big enough"
| result, so that others can build off of it? Or does this
| needlessly clutter the field with publications? There's
| probably some optimal balance, but I don't think the right
| balance is immediately clear.
| nextn wrote:
| Why would publishing anything new needlessly clutter the
| field?
|
| Discovering something is hard, proving it correct is hard,
| and writing a paper about is hard. Why delay all this?
| bumby wrote:
| Playing devils advocate, there isn't a consensus on what
| is incremental vs what is derivative. In theory, the
| latter may not warrant publication because anyone
| familiar with the state-of-the-art could connect the dots
| without reading about it in a publication.
| SilasX wrote:
| Ouch. That would hurt to hear. It's like they're
| effectively saying, "yeah, _obviously_ you came up with
| something more significant than this, which you 're holding
| back. No one would be so incapable that _this_ was as far
| as they could take the result! "
| cvoss wrote:
| The idea that a small number of reviewers can accurately
| quantify the importance of a paper as some number of "impact
| points," and the idea that a journal should rely on this
| number and an arbitrary cut off point to decide publication,
| are both unreasonable ideas.
|
| The journal may have acted _systematically_ , but the system
| is arbitrary and capricious. Thus, the journal did not act
| reasonably.
| Arainach wrote:
| These patterns are ultimately detrimental to team/community
| building, however.
|
| You see it in software as well: As a manager in calibration
| meetings, I have repeatedly seen how it is harder to convince
| a committee to promote/give a high rating to someone with a
| large pile of crucial but individually small projects
| delivered than someone with a single large project.
|
| This is discouraging to people whose efforts seem to be
| unrewarded and creates bad incentives for people to hoard
| work and avoid sharing until one large impact, and it's
| disastrous when (as in most software teams) those people
| don't have significant autonomy over which projects they're
| assigned.
| saghm wrote:
| If this was actually how stuff was measured, it might be
| defensible. I'm having trouble believing that things are
| actually done this objectively rather than the rejections
| being somewhat arbitrary. Do you think that results can
| really be analyzed and compared in this way? How do you know
| that it's 5 and 2 and not 6 and 1 or 4 and 3, and how do you
| determine how many points a full result is worth in total?
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| It's demonstrably (there is one demonstration right there)
| self-defeating and counter-productive, and so by definition
| not reasonable.
|
| Each individual step along the way merely has some rationale,
| but rationales come in the full spectrum of quality.
| omoikane wrote:
| But proportionally, wouldn't a solution without an epsilon
| loss be much better than a solution with epsilon?
|
| I am not sure what's the exact conjecture that the author
| solved, but if the epsilon difference is between an
| approximate solution versus an exact solution, and the
| journal rejected the exact solution because it was "only an
| epsilon improvement", I might question how reputable that
| journal really was.
| sunshowers wrote:
| Given the current incentive scheme in place it's locally
| reasonable, but the current incentives suck. Is the goal to
| score the most impact points or to advance our understanding
| of the field?
| gxs wrote:
| Are you sure this wasn't an application to the DMV or an
| attempt to pull a building permit?
| stevage wrote:
| It actually seems reasonable for a journal that has limited
| space and too many submissions. What's the alternative, to
| accept on or two of the half proofs, and bump one or two other
| papers in the process?
| jiggawatts wrote:
| Wow, it's so sad that their budget doesn't stretch to
| purchasing hard drives with capacities measured in gigabytes.
| It must be rough having to delete old files from the floppies
| they're still forced to use in this day and age.
| y1n0 wrote:
| That logic is absurd. You might as well consider the whole
| internet a journal and everything is already published, so
| there is nothing to complain about.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| It pretty much _is_ the logic -- except replace digital
| media with paper.
|
| It's also "why" research papers can't have color pictures
| or tables of raw data -- because they're expensive to
| print.
|
| Scientists internalised their limitations and treat these
| as virtues now.
|
| Limited space in printing means you have to "get in", and
| that exclusivity has a cachet. They also now advise each
| other that photos are "not real science" (too much
| color!) and raw data shouldn't be published at all.
|
| I was making a joke to highlight how inane this is in an
| era where I can keep every paper ever published on one
| hard drive.
|
| The same people that complain about negative results or
| reproductions not getting published will defend these
| limitations to the death.
| JJMcJ wrote:
| Do Reddit mods also edit math journals?
| bumby wrote:
| A lot of the replies make it seem like there is some great
| over-arching coordination and intent between subsequent
| submissions, but I'll offer up an alternative explanation:
| sometimes the reviewer selection is an utter crap shoot. Just
| because the first set of reviewers may offer a justification
| for rejection, it may be completely unrelated to the rationale
| of a different set of reviewers. Reviewers are human and bring
| all kinds of biases and perspectives into the process.
|
| It's frustrating but the result of a somewhat haphazard
| process. It's also not uncommon for conflicting comments within
| the same review cycle. Some of this may be attributed to a lack
| of clear communication by the author. But on occasion, it leads
| me to believe many journals don't take a lot of time selecting
| appropriate reviewers and settle for the first few that agree
| to review.
| grepLeigh wrote:
| What's the compensation scheme for reviewers?
|
| Are there any mechanisms to balance out the "race to the
| bottom" observed in other types of academic compensation?
| e.g. increase of adjunct/gig work replacing full-time
| professorship.
|
| Do universities require staff to perform a certain number of
| reviews in academic journals?
| acomjean wrote:
| I know from some of my peers that reviewed biology
| (genetics) papers, they weren't compensated.
|
| I was approached to review something for no compensation as
| well, but I was a bad fit.
| hanche wrote:
| Normally, referees are unpaid. You're just supposed to do
| your share of referee work. And then the publisher sells
| the fruits of all that work (research and refereeing) back
| to universities at a steep price. Academic publishing is
| one of the most profitable businesses on the planet! But
| univesities and academics are fighting back. Have been for
| a few years, but the fight is not yet over.
| paulpauper wrote:
| It's implicitly understood that volunteer work makes the
| publishing process 'work'. It's supposed to be a level
| playing field where money does not matter.
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Typically, at least in physics (but as far as I know in all
| sciences), it's not compensated, and the reviewers are
| anonymous. Some journals try to change this, with some
| "reviewer coins", or Nature, which now publishes reviewer
| names if a paper is accepted and if the reviewer agrees. I
| think these are bad ideas.
|
| Professors are expected to review by their employer,
| typically, and it's a (very small) part of the tenure
| process.
| tokinonagare wrote:
| I don't thing it's a money problem. It's more like a
| framing issue, with some reviewers being too narrow-minded,
| or lacking background knowledge on the topic of the paper.
| It's not uncommon to have a full lab with people focussing
| on very different things, when you look in the details, the
| exact researchers interests don't overlap too much.
| hanche wrote:
| > sometimes the reviewer selection is an utter crap shoot
|
| Indeed, but when someone of Tao's caliber submits a paper,
| any editor would (should) make an extra effort to get the
| very best researchers to referee the paper.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Don't you hate it when you lose your epsilon, only to find it
| and it's too late?
|
| I wonder what the conjecture was?
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| I am actually quite surprised Terence Tao still gets papers
| rejected from math journals... but appreciate him sharing this,
| as hearing this from him will help newer scientists not get
| discouraged by a rejection.
|
| I had the lucky opportunity to do a postdoc with one of the most
| famous people in my field, and I was shocked how much difference
| the name did make- I never had a paper rejection from top tier
| journals submitting with him as the corresponding author. I am
| fairly certain the editors would have rejected my work for not
| being fundamentally on an interesting enough topic to them, if
| not for the name. The fact that a big name is interested in
| something, alone can make it a "high impact subject."
| vouaobrasil wrote:
| > I am actually quite surprised Terence Tao still gets papers
| rejected from math journals
|
| At least it indicates that the system is working somewhat
| properly some of the time...
| jcrites wrote:
| Could that also be because he reviewed the papers first and
| made sure they were in a suitable state to publish? Or you
| think it really was just the name alone, and if you had
| published without him they would not have been accepted?
| aborsy wrote:
| Research is getting more and more specialized. Increasingly there
| may not be many potential journals for a paper, and, even if
| there are, the paper might be sent to the same reviewers (small
| sub communities).
|
| You may have to leave a year of work on arxiv, with the
| expectation that the work will be rehashed and used in other
| published papers.
| atrettel wrote:
| I agree with the discussion that rejection is normal and
| researchers should discuss it more often.
|
| That said, I do think that "publish or perish" plays an unspoken
| role here. I see a lot of colleagues trying to push out "least
| publishable units" that might barely pass review (by definition).
| If you need to juice your metrics, it's a common strategy that
| people employ. Still, I think a lot of papers would pass peer
| review more easily if researchers just combined multiple results
| into a single longer paper. I find those papers to be easier to
| read since they require less boilerplate, and I imagine they
| would be easier to pass peer review by the virtue that they
| simply contain more significant results.
| nextn wrote:
| Longer papers with more claims have more to prove, not less. I
| imagine they would be harder to pass peer review.
| tredre3 wrote:
| > Longer papers with more claims have more to prove, not
| less. I imagine they would be harder to pass peer review.
|
| Yes, a longer paper puts more work on the peer reviewers
| (handful of people). But splitting one project in multiple
| papers puts more work on the reader (thousands of people).
| There is a balance to strike.
| paulpauper wrote:
| Lots of co-authors. That is one surefire way to inflate it.
| ak_111 wrote:
| - hey honey how was work today?
|
| - it was fine, I desk rejected terence tao, his result was a bit
| meh and the write up wasn't up to my standard. Then I had a bit
| of a quite office hour, anyway, ...
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| I've had the surreal moment of attending a workshop where the
| main presenter (famous) is talking about their soon to-be-
| published work where I realize that I'm one of their reviewers
| (months after I wrote the review, so no impact on my score). In
| this case, I loved their paper and gave it high marks, and so
| did the other reviewers. Not surprising when I found out who
| the author was!!!
|
| I have to not say a word to them as I talk to them or else I
| could ruin the whole peer review thing!
|
| "Hey honey, I reviewed X work from Y famous person today"
| haunter wrote:
| fwiw, editorial review =/= peer review
| ak_111 wrote:
| I always thought that part of the upside of being tenured and
| extremely recognised as a leader of your field is the freedom to
| submit to incredibly obscure (non-predatory) journals just for
| fun.
| d0mine wrote:
| Why journals exist at all? Could papers be published on something
| like arxiv.org (like software is on github.com)?
|
| It could support links/backref, citations(forks),
| questions(discussions), tags, followers, etc easily.
| bumby wrote:
| Part of the idea is that journals help curate better
| publications via the peer review process. Whether or not that
| occurs in practice is up for some debate.
|
| Having a curated list can be important to separate the wheat
| from the chaff, especially in an era with ever increasing rates
| of research papers.
| sunshowers wrote:
| I think in math, and in many other fields, it is pretty normal
| to post all papers on arXiv. But arXiv has a lot of incorrect
| papers on it (tons of P vs NP papers for example), so journals
| are supposed to act as a filtering mechanism. How well they
| succeed at it is debated.
| bumby wrote:
| Adam Grant once related an amusing rejection from a double-blind
| review. One of the reviewers justified the rejection with
| something along the lines of "The author would do well to
| familiarize themselves with the work of Adam Grant"
| Upvoter33 wrote:
| This also happens pretty commonly. However, it's not even
| unreasonable! Sometimes you write a paper and you don't do a
| good enough of a job putting in the context of your own related
| work.
| CrazyStat wrote:
| And sometimes the reviewer didn't read carefully and doesn't
| understand what you're doing.
|
| I once wrote a paper along the lines of "look we can do X
| blazingly fast, which (among other things) lets us put it
| inside a loop and do it millions of times to do Y." A
| reviewer responded with "I don't understand what the point of
| doing X fast is if you're just going to put it in a loop and
| make it slow again." He also asked us to run simulations to
| compare our method to another paper which was doing an
| unrelated thing Z. The editor agreed that we could ignore his
| comments.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Yes, funny the first time.
|
| Not so much the fifth!
| orthoxerox wrote:
| Life imitates art. In a 1986 comedy "Back to School" Rodney
| Dangerfield's character delegates his college assignments to
| various subject matter experts. His English Lit teacher berates
| him for it, saying that not only did he obviously cheat, but he
| also copied his essay from someone who's unfamiliar with the
| works of Kurt Vonnegut. Of course, the essay was written by
| Vonnegut himself, appearing in a cameo role.
| TZubiri wrote:
| "Rejection is actually a relatively common occurrence for me,
| happening once or twice a year on average."
|
| This feels like a superhuman trying to empathize with a regular
| person.
| ziofill wrote:
| This is his main point, and I wholeheartedly agree: _...a
| perception can be created that all of one 's peers are achieving
| either success or controversy, with one's own personal career
| ending up becoming the only known source of examples of "mundane"
| failure. I speculate that this may be a contributor to the
| "impostor syndrome"..._
| ndesaulniers wrote:
| The master has failed more than the beginner has tried.
| 23B1 wrote:
| A similar story.
|
| I actively blogged about my thesis and it somehow came up in one
| of those older-model plagarism detectors (this was years and
| years ago, it might have been just some hamfisted google search).
|
| The (boomer) profs convened a 'panel' without my knowledge and
| decided I had in fact plagiarized, and informed me I was in deep
| doo doo. I was pretty much ready to lose my mind, my career was
| over, years wasted, etc.
|
| Luckily I was buddy with a Princeton prof. who had dealt with
| this sort of thing and he guided me through the minefield. I came
| out fine, but my school never apologized.
|
| Failure is often just temporary and might not even be real
| failure.
| tetha wrote:
| > Because of this, a perception can be created that all of one's
| peers are achieving either success or controversy, with one's own
| personal career ending up becoming the only known source of
| examples of "mundane" failure.
|
| I've found similar insights when I joined a community of
| musicians and also discovered twitch / youtube presences of
| musicians I listen to. Some of Dragonforces corona streams are
| absolutely worth a watch.
|
| It's easy to listen to mixed and finished albums and... despair
| to a degree. How could anyone learn to become that good? It must
| be impossible, giving up seems the only rational choice.
|
| But in reality, people struggle and fumble along at their level.
| Sure enough, the level of someone playing guitar professionally
| for 20 years is a tad higher than mine, but that really, really
| perfect album take? That's the one take out of a couple dozen.
|
| This really helped me "ground" or "calibrate" my sense of how
| good or how bad I am and gave me a better appreciation of how
| much of a marathon an instrument can be.
| cess11 wrote:
| Journals are typically for-profit, and science is not, so they
| don't always align and we should not expect journals to serve
| science except incidentally.
| NicholasGurr wrote:
| He can use my name.
|
| - Dr. Nick Gurr
| justinl33 wrote:
| It's okay Terence, it happens to the best of us.
| slackr wrote:
| Reminds me--I wish someone would make an anti-LinkedIn, where the
| norm is to announce only setbacks and mistakes, disappointments
| etc.
| remoquete wrote:
| Folks already do. They often turn them into inspirational
| tales.
| omoikane wrote:
| There was a site where people posted company failures:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
| cperciva wrote:
| In 2005, my paper on breaking RSA by observing a single private-
| key operation from a different hyperthread sharing the same L1
| cache -- literally the first publication of a cryptographic
| attack exploiting shared caches -- was rejected from the
| cryptology preprint archive on the grounds that "it was about CPU
| architecture, not cryptography". Rejection from journals is like
| rejection from VCs -- it happens all the time and often not for
| any good reason.
|
| (That paper has now been cited 971 times according to Google
| Scholar, despite never appearing in a journal.)
| davrosthedalek wrote:
| Is it on the arxiv? If not, please put it there.
| kzz102 wrote:
| In academic publishing, there is an implicit agreement between
| the authors and the journal to roughly match the importance of
| the paper to the prestige of the journal. Since there is no
| universal standard on either the prestige of the journal or the
| importance of the paper, mismatches happen regularly, and
| rejection is the natural result. In fact, the only way to avoid
| rejections is to submit a paper to a journal of lower prestige
| than your estimate, which is clearly not what authors want to do.
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