elitism at NIPS

[Scott E. Fahlman]

Personally, I think that "blind" reviewing is a bad idea because it is
dishonest.  In a field like this one, it is easy in 90% of the cases for an
experienced reviewer to tell who is the author of a paper, or at least what
group the paper is from.  I think it's better to be explicit about the lack
of anonymity, and to challenge the reviewers to consciously try to rise
above any "in group" bias than to provide a show of anonymity that is
really a fraud in most cases.

I also believe that in some cases the identity of the author does provide
essential context to the reviewer.  If I were to present evidence that my
own Cascade-Correlation algorithm gets certain things wrong, a reviewer
might not have to worry as much about rookie mistakes in running Cascor as
he would in a paper from someone he has never heard of.  On the other hand,
if I claim that Cascor does certain things *better* than the competition,
the claim might warrant extra scrutiny because I am an interested party in
the debate.  Even more scrutiny is called for if I am known to have a
long-standing feud with the person whose work I am criticizing.

I know that this view is controversial.  Some of you will certainly argue
that such considerations have no place in science, and that every paper
must stand or fall on its content alone.  Perhaps that is true in a long
paper, but it may be impossible to present all the relevant context in an
eight-page paper. (Because of the NIPS style, this is more like a 5-page
paper published elsehwere.)

I don't know if this is the right forum for a debate on the merits of blind
reviewing.  I just thought it would be useful to point out that there are
some arguments on the other side.

-- Scott

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Scott E. Fahlman			Internet:  sef+ at cs.cmu.edu
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