So, now I’m confused about what you’re actually saying. You start by acknowledging that the status quo in academic writing is a standard of bad, obfuscatory writing (and this goes back to what you said originally: “All the people I know in academia...complain about journal standards.”)
But then you posit some kind of broad pool of outside-the-status-quo “good” journals, that hold different standards? I don’t think this pool exists. If they did, the status quo would be different, and your friends would not have the uniform complaint that you report.
And being a reviewer isn’t particularly high-status, because it’s typically an anonymous job. In fact the really top-of-the-field academics usually don’t do much reviewing, because they’re too busy. The one exception is that journals will, as a courtesy, often give big-name academics the chance to review articles that attack or oppose their own work. (You can probably see why this is a bad idea, but it’s very common—and results, as you might expect, in “unorthodox” papers being denied publication.)
You start by acknowledging that the status quo in academic writing is a standard of bad, obfuscatory writing
I didn’t say that. I said that standards inhibit optimal writing, not that they encourage bad writing. I also didn’t say there was a broad pool of publication venues, just enough that you can publish what you want there and read what you want there. For instance, in machine learning, it would be:
I’m sure you can still find some poorly-written papers there (especially at the conferences, where reviewers are very over-worked), but I would be very surprised if you thought that the papers there were bad and obfuscatory. Reviewers spot obfuscation a mile away and penalize it appropriately.
And being a reviewer isn’t particularly high-status, because it’s typically an anonymous job.
Yes, I was wrong about that. Being an area chair or sitting on an editorial board is high-status, though, or so I believe.
So, now I’m confused about what you’re actually saying. You start by acknowledging that the status quo in academic writing is a standard of bad, obfuscatory writing (and this goes back to what you said originally: “All the people I know in academia...complain about journal standards.”)
But then you posit some kind of broad pool of outside-the-status-quo “good” journals, that hold different standards? I don’t think this pool exists. If they did, the status quo would be different, and your friends would not have the uniform complaint that you report.
And being a reviewer isn’t particularly high-status, because it’s typically an anonymous job. In fact the really top-of-the-field academics usually don’t do much reviewing, because they’re too busy. The one exception is that journals will, as a courtesy, often give big-name academics the chance to review articles that attack or oppose their own work. (You can probably see why this is a bad idea, but it’s very common—and results, as you might expect, in “unorthodox” papers being denied publication.)
I didn’t say that. I said that standards inhibit optimal writing, not that they encourage bad writing. I also didn’t say there was a broad pool of publication venues, just enough that you can publish what you want there and read what you want there. For instance, in machine learning, it would be:
Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems
AI & Statistics
Journal of Machine Learning Research
Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence
I’m sure you can still find some poorly-written papers there (especially at the conferences, where reviewers are very over-worked), but I would be very surprised if you thought that the papers there were bad and obfuscatory. Reviewers spot obfuscation a mile away and penalize it appropriately.
Yes, I was wrong about that. Being an area chair or sitting on an editorial board is high-status, though, or so I believe.