First person to correctly fill in the blanks above gets a free copy of Bayesian Data Analysis, a free copy of Regression and Other Stories, and a free copy of Stan!
OK, here’s the answer . . .
If you guessed “Software engineering,” you’re a winner!
The phrase came from this seminar announcement (forwarded to me by Mark Tuttle) from computer scientist Paul Ralph:
Scholarly peer-review . . . is demonstrably prejudiced, unreliable, inaccurate, wasteful and sometimes devastating to researchers’ careers and emotional wellbeing. The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Task Force convened to overcome these problems by developing empirical standards. . . . Empirical standards facilitate transforming peer review into a process of checking whether a study meets transparent expectations set by our community, rather than the whims of individuals. This transformation will produce numerous benefits for researchers, reviewers, editors, and society, including increasing acceptance rates and research quality while decreasing workloads and frustration. In this webinar, Prof. Ralph will describe the standards and how they can be used, how they were created, how they produce benefits, how they will evolve, how they will be governed, and how you can get involved. Software engineering—not medicine or physics or psychology—is going to usher forth a revolution in peer review: a revolution of fairness, effectiveness, consistency, and kindness.
I have my problems with peer review: as I’ve written, the problem with peer review is the peers. Groupthink is not solved by consulting with more people from the group. So I’m glad to see new efforts in this area, even when they’re accompanied by a bit a lot of hype.
Artificial intelligence
Wishful thinking
Machine learning
Software engineering?!
Pretty easy exercise in googling it turned out…
Brian Wansink
ftw
GitHub Copilot
I was gonna guess “Absolutely nothing” but maybe I’m too cynical.
Day Drinking!
I think the relevant precedent/cautionary tale might be IBM’s Watson and cancer.
Though rereading the the press release, it looks more like they’re talking about QA checklists and scoring rubrics, which lots of fields with no connection to software engineering use and which would be ill-suited to this problem.
free distribution
it has to be Crack Cocaine at this point
“Pretending to care”
Blockchain
I think the answer is “Merging the minds of all scientists into a single blob of conscious protoplasm”, but I’m not sure how to write it in two words.
Scotch whiskey
Fair Pay?
No, this is too science fiction.
“Software engineering—not medicine or physics or psychology…”
Bit odd, given that medicine in particular already has tons of standards like these. See, e.g., http://www.goodreports.org
Oh dear, I thought the first one who fills in his own name, therefore making a commitment to the cause, would get the prize.
Crediting reviewers as co-authors
Anonymous Commenter
I will solve it by rejecting all papers
That would be fair and consistent, but not effective or kind.
Approving all papers would be fair, consistent, and kind.
Let’s publish everything.
Sure. If it was worth funding, then it is worth publishing the outcome. Even if something went wrong with the study, others may learn from that experience.
Andrew Gelman
Incentivizing altruism