Comment by godelski

> This is the sort of mistake that's awfully easy to make in ML.

It is important to remember this! Mistakes are common because they are easy to make. Science is a noisy process, but there is signal there and what we see here is exactly what peer review is about. I tend to argue that open publications are a better form of peer review than conferences/journals because of exactly this. Peer review is about your peers reviewing your work, less about whatever random and noisy standard a conference/journal puts forward. Remember that this was the way things happened for most of our history and that our modern notion of peer review is very recent (mid 70's). Older journals were more about accomplishing the mission that arxiv accomplishes today: disseminating works.

https://mitcommlab.mit.edu/broad/commkit/peer-review-a-histo...

[side note] another reason I'd advocate for the abolishment of conferences/journals is that through this we can actively advocate for reproduction papers, failure papers, and many other important aspects since we would not be held to the "novelty" criteria (almost everything is incremental). "Publishing" is about communicating your work to your peers and having them validate or invalidate your results.

[edit] I think conferences are good in the fact that they bring people together and that encourages collaboration. That's great. But I should clarify that I'm specifically talking about using these platforms as a means to judge the validity of works. If a conference system wants to just invite works and the community, then I'm totally cool with that. I do also like journals in theory given that there's a conversation happening between authors and reviewers, but I believe this also could just easily be accomplished through arxiv + github or OpenReview (preferred).