Yoav Goldberg on academia's hidden grind: forced to rank incomparable papers and people
yoavgo · x · 2026-09-25
NLP researcher Yoav Goldberg sums up the behind-the-scenes of academic life: constantly being put in situations where you must assess items — papers, proposals, people — that aren't comparable to each other, without a clear metric, then pick the top K and discard the rest.
Asked "which of these are most excellent?", his answer: in reality they're all sufficiently qualified, none is exceptionally good, each is different, and the scales don't match. "I hate it," he writes.
Related event: Yoav Goldberg Slams Academic Review: Ranking the Unrankable(3 posts)→
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