Whether it’s actually 20% or not doesn’t matter, everyone is aware the signal of the top confs is in freefall.
There are also rings of reviewer fraud going on where groups of people in these niche areas all get assigned their own papers and recommend acceptance and in many cases the AC is part of this as well. Am not saying this is common but it is occurring.
It feels as if every layer of society is in maximum extraction mode and this is just a single example. No one is spending time to carefully and deeply review a paper because they care and they feel on principal that’s the right thing to do. People did used to do this.
The argument is that there is no incentive to carefully review a paper (I agree), however what used to occur is people would do the right thing without explicit incentives. This has totally disappeared.
The concept of the professional has been basically obliterated in our society. Instead we have people doing engineering, science, and doctoring as, just, jobs. Individual contributors of various flavors to be shuffled around by middle management.
Without professions, there are no more professional communities really, no more professional standards to uphold, no reason to get in the way of somebody’s publications.
It is soundly unfair and unjustified to extrapolate the ML community to all professions. What is happening in the ML world is the exception, not the norm, and not some fundamental failing of society.
I don’t think it’s an extrapolation from the ML community into other industries.
This evolution of society is objectively happening - artisanship, care for the work beyond capital gain, and commitment to depth in a focused category - are diminishing and harder to find qualities. I’d probably label it related to capital and material social economics.
It’s perhaps more unfair and unjustified to not recognize this as a real societal issue and claim it only exists in the ML community.
It's a poor extrapolation. The issues with the ML community have more to do with the exponential growth of the "AI" industry, the resulting flow of capital, and the outsized role these conferences provide for establishing a researchers value to the industry. These conditions are fairly unique.
I would propose that the evolution you speak of is more related to our technology (and I am not just saying AI, far from it) and how it is now possible to perform the very minimum requirements of a task with little effort.
I don’t disagree that technology is allowing a new low bar for minimal allowable effort. This is true in a world where the same technology could enable one to deliver amazing things.
I’m speaking more generally and I think you describe the exact problem in your clarification which boils down to “people are chasing money and doing whatever it takes in ML, where the money currently is”. I was stopping at the fact that “people […] chasing money and doing whatever it takes” has become the general personal pursuit, quality/depth/care be damned.
She opens with an example of a bank. She walked in and asked for a debit card. The teller told her to take a seat. 30 minutes later, the teller told her the bank doesn't issue debit cards. Firstly, what kind of bank doesn't issue debit cards, and secondly, what kind of bank takes 30 minutes to figure out whether or not it issues debit cards? And this is just one of many examples of things that society does that have no reason not to work, that should have been selected away long ago if they did not work - that bank should have been bankrupt long ago - but for some reason this is not happening and everything is just getting clogged with bullshit and non-working solutions.
It's because people are commodities now. Human resources exists to manage the shuffle between warm bodies.
It's back to OP's point. There's no such thing as professions now. Just jobs. We put them on and off like hats. With that churn comes lack of institutional knowledge and a rule set handed down from the C Suite for front line employees completely detached from the front line work.
But even given that, how is it that everything doesn't work very well?
The normal functioning of markets would be that badly-working things are slowly driven out, while well-working things grow and replace them. Even without any reference to financial markets, this is simply what you expect to happen when people have a variety of things to choose from.
I could hypothesize that markets have evolved to the point where it's impossible for new things to grow unless they are already shit. Perhaps because everyone's too busy working for the shit things (which is partly because the government keeps printing money to the previously successful things in order to prevent the economy collapsing and therefore landlords got to charge exorbitant rent) or perhaps because they just don't have any money because of the above, and can only afford the cheap shit things (but a lot of the shit things are expensive?) or perhaps because people are afraid to start new things because they're afraid of the government (I've observed that not infrequently on HN, also something something testosterone microplastics) or perhaps because advertising effectiveness has reached the point where new things never become discoverable and stay crowded out as old things ramp up advertisement to compensate or perhaps we're just all depressed (because of the housing market probably).
If the Zucc has a weird day he starts dropping 10-100M salary packages in order to poach AI researchers. No wonder the game is getting rigged up the butthole.
to some degree this is a "market correction" on the inherent value of these papers. There's way too many low-value papers that are being published purely for career advancement and CV padding reasons. Hard to get peer reviewers to care about those.
There are also rings of reviewer fraud going on where groups of people in these niche areas all get assigned their own papers and recommend acceptance and in many cases the AC is part of this as well. Am not saying this is common but it is occurring.
It feels as if every layer of society is in maximum extraction mode and this is just a single example. No one is spending time to carefully and deeply review a paper because they care and they feel on principal that’s the right thing to do. People did used to do this.