- What is the problem being studied? Is it motivated in a compelling manner, by either practical or theoretical considerations? New problems warrant more careful scrutiny.
- What is the result? If there are several results, usually I only look at the main result and evaluate the paper based solely on its best result.
- Is the proof clever or difficult? Can I identify the key idea, and is it novel?
- Finally, I give the paper a bonus if it is particularly well-written and a big malus if it is particularly poorly written, especially if the authors are all well beyond their student years - I get impatient with them, and think to myself that they should know better.
At this point in my career, this is usually all fairly routine. However, as Daniel Dennett suggests: "Perhaps our approximation of a perfect Kantian faculty of practical reason falls so far short that our proud self-identification as moral agents is a delusion of grandeur. " I was recently given a paper to review for a conference, and something strange happened. Based on my usual criteria outlined above, I sent to the program committee a mild recommendation for rejection and promptly put the submission in the trash. But instead of instantly forgetting about it, I kept remembering bits and pieces of it and found myself trying to reconstruct parts of the proofs. After a couple of days, it dawned on me that, even though the submission did not pass the filter of my "objective" criteria, still, I was interested in it and actually liked it!
I wonder what one should do in that case. Should you trust your instinct, or obey your evaluation rules? Go with your Guts, or Let Reason Rule?
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