Over the years, I've told colleagues and friends about things I have seen or experienced. Many times, people have said that I should write them down so that they won't be lost and forgotten, since some of them might be useful parts of our history. I've been writing them down, without being sure what I would do with them. I decided to gradually post them on this website, and see what reactions I get. I suggest reading from the bottom up (starting with the August 2017 post "The Meritocracy"). Thoughtful and kind feedback would be useful for me, and would help me to revise the exposition to make it as useful as possible. I hope that while you read my stories you will ask yourself "What can I learn from this?" I'm particularly interested in knowing what you see as the point of the story, or what you take away from it. Please send feedback to asilverb@gmail.com. Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully reflect on them!

I often run the stories past the people I mention, even when they are anonymized, to get their feedback and give them a chance to correct the record or ask for changes. When they tell me they're happy to be named, I sometimes do so. When I give letters as pseudonyms, there is no correlation between those letters and the names of the real people.

Monday, January 29, 2018

How do I know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?

When a paper is submitted for publication, the editors send it out for expert opinions. The first time I was asked for my opinion about a computer science paper, I blurted out "How am I supposed to know how good it is, if I don't know who wrote it?" 

From that, I realized how crucially my judgment of the work depended on my opinion of who did it.

I was accustomed to refereeing mathematics papers, where the authors' names are revealed to the referees. But computer science often has double-blind reviewing, where the reviewers don't know the identities of the authors. It took me awhile to get used to this. I found that I was trying to guess the authors' identities. But that lessened as I've learned how often my guesses are wrong!

I wonder how much our opinions of the work are shaped by what we learn from seeing the authors' names.