Thoughts about academia

It’s 0:54 a.m. now and I just finished resubmitting supplementary materials of my submission to CVPR. Apparently, an OpenReview bug leaked CVPR submission IDs and corresponding authors, so new IDs were assigned and we were asked to remove the old ones.

This OpenReview incident also led to some absurd stories — for example, the infamous “40-question reviewer”. While laughable, it makes me question the current environment of research: everyone is more or less blindly chasing the top conferences and yet, the acceptance probability seems increasingly weakly correlated with the actual quality of the paper, largely due to low-quality reviews.

I don’t want to be overly pessimistic (actually, I personally want to be a research scientist in the future). However, for now something is indeed wrong. As my mentor Mark said, it’s not ‘sustainable’. I and probably many other people know something should be changed, yet I and most of you just don’t have the capability to rewrite the rules.

Another issue I personally encounter and I think is becoming increasingly common is that: there are not many meaningful works left for non-top institutions (not to mention individuals). Indeed, scaling-up works are meaningful, and some works that require less resources are also meaningful. Yet, these fields are crowded without exception (or require more ‘intellectual resources’, like pure theory). And crowdedness brings most of the problems not only in these fields, but also the whole academia in general:

• Most works are incremental or even worse, combinatory. Of course, incremental improvements and combination could still result in some meaningful works. However the cost-effectiveness ratio is significantly lower than in a less over-competitive and publication-oriented community.
• Ideas will collide, even if you haven’t found one yet. This happened to me. It’s not hard to see why since the community is crowded.
• Propagation of publication-oriented culture. If most of your collegues are chasing paper counts instead of quality, unless you’ve already had 10k citations, it would be hard not to join them.
• …

Again, I’m not blaming on anyone, it’s the environment that shapes people and most of us have no options. However I believe it’s valuable if one can stick to his original motivation and aspiration (which does not need to be noble of course, for example, for salary or just for fun). Furthermore, if no efforts are made, academia might eventually collapse one day and we really don’t want to see that happen.

(I still find it a bit hard to write articles that look native, maybe I’ll write in chinese and translate next time. Or maybe I’ll still want to practice, who knows?)