November 14, 2023

Antoine Amarilli a.k.a a3nm

Politiser le bien-être

I have read the book Politiser le bien-être by Camille Teste. A possible English translation of the title would be: “Making wellness political”.

I found the book interesting, so I wrote this blogpost to summarize it. Maybe this can help make the book's message available to a larger audience: the book is written in French, and not freely available online. Of course, these notes are just my personal work: I am not affiliated to the author, and they do not claim to be a substitute to the book.

The high-level structure of the book is in three parts:

  • Define wellness as it is usually understood, and present its shortcomings.
  • Analyze how and why activist movements reject wellness, even though wellness can be useful to such movements.
  • Propose how to build a political form of wellness, which can address its limits, support political activism, and enable change.

Wellness and its shortcomings

Wellness can be understood as health in the far-reaching sense of the constitution of the World Health Organization: “Health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” It can also be understood as encompassing various sectors, inspired by the list of the Global Wellness Institute (a wellness trade group):

These practices are a significant sector of economic activity. Indeed, they represent an economy whose worldwide value is estimated by GWI to be $4.9 trillion in 2019, with expectations of growth despite a dip during COVID. This amounts to a few percents of the world economy, which the World bank estimates to $133 trillion in 2019.

So, there is a large industry that aims at making people feel better. What's not to like about it? The book argues that wellness can be criticized in at least three main ways:

  • The need for wellness nowadays is made more acute by the capitalistic system2 which is powering the wellness industry:
    • One leading cause is wage labor, which pushes people to work long hours at demanding and sometimes physically harmful jobs, sacrificing their well-being.
    • More insidiously, we can suffer because of the loss of meaning at work, and the possible harmful effects of one's work on the planet.
    • Other social trends makes wellness more necessary to some groups. For instance, patriarchy has negative effects on the well-being of women specifically, e.g., mental load, social pressure (e.g., to conform to beauty standards), and of course aggression risks. So women are especially in need of what wellness can offer3. One can make similar points about racism. In other words, the wellness industry exists in a system that actively works against the well-being of some people.
  • Well-being practices are normative and not inclusive:
    • They drive away many people who do not conform, e.g., physical practices (yoga, etc.) are not marketed towards people who are too fat according to dominant standards.
    • Also, they are expensive, so they mostly cater to the needs of the rich, even though they are typically not the ones who need it most.
  • Some wellness practices are actually a Trojan horse for problematic doctrines:
    • Essentializing gender or biology;
    • Cultural appropriation of non-Western practices;
    • Quackery, e.g., people favoring ineffective alternative medicine over effective conventional treatments, and facing dire health consequences;
    • Taking advantage of psychologically vulnerable people, e.g., selling them expensive therapy, or enlisting them in cults.

So, the effects of the wellness industry are sef-defeating because they happen in a system that works against wellness; they are misallocated, often problematic, and mostly try to alleviate the symptoms rather than fixing the root causes of unhappiness. The book further points out the deeper problem that our perception of well-being is wrong:

  • The wellness industry leads people to believe that well-being is something that they can buy4, reducing happiness to a financial question: you will be happy if you earn enough and consume enough. This makes us forget about alternatives such as downshifting or simple living: doing less, working less, simplifying our lives, being happy with less, etc.
  • Well-being is presented as a purely individual pursuit, with approaches focusing on the self (think of exercise, dieting, meditation, yoga, etc.). This can give us a fake sense of control, i.e., it gives the impression that we can be happy through our individual actions. However, the wellness industry is in fact neglecting the collective factors of happiness: cultivating meaningful relationships, being connected, feeling helpful, etc. It is also distracting us from the political causes of our unhappiness. For instance, it put individual workers in charge of dealing with their problems (e.g., working conditions, work-life balance), even though these are better understood as a collective struggle (e.g., via labor unions).
  • The individual approach to well-being comes with a form of moral imperative: you have a personal responsibility towards others to become the best version of yourself. Instead, we should see this more at a collective level (again: caring for each other), and at a political level (aiming for a system which would make it easier for everyone to be happy).

This warped perception of well-being is part of a individualistic trend where we are less and less willing to rely on each other5 and to believe in the value of collective action, or even in the fact that collective action is possible.

Wellness and activist movements

Having presented this picture of wellness, the book moves on to the question of how wellness is perceived by activist movements. (The book uses “the left” as shorthand to talk about activist groups that seek to effect change towards some worthy goals, but I find this a bit polarizing so will stick with more neutral terminology.) It starts by a concrete example: a wellness week-end organized by Extinction Rebellion for its members, which drew significant criticism from other activist groups:

  • The spiritual overtones of such initiatives are seen with skepticism because they are perceived as incompatible with a rational, fact-based approach. This may make the movement less effective (e.g., if spiritual practices are substituted to evidence-based practices), and may also harm the credibility of the movement (e.g., on scientific issues like climate change).
  • Further, they are reminiscent of organized religion, but left-wing movements (in particular marxism) typically see religion as a tool used by those in power to justify the current world order (e.g., via promises of a happier afterlife).
  • Last, the use of spirituality by cults, and the closeness between wellness and cultish practices, may mislead outside observers and make them see activist groups as cults.

There are other apparent reasons why, arguably, activist movements should not focus on wellness:

  • Wellness activities are less urgent and less effective than direct action, e.g., an activist group should focus on its goals first and foremost, and not the well-being of its members. Likewise, the public perception of individual activists is often that they should be ready to give everything to support their cause, instead of wallowing in self-care.
  • Focusing on one's well-being is a privilege, and one that the underprivileged typically do not have. Hence, activist movements may be seen as hypocritical if they present to act towards social justice but end up focusing on wellness activities that are intended for their privileged members.
  • In any case, pragmatically, in an individual sense, activism is often tiring and disheartening, so it is often not a good way to be happy.

The book proposes the following retorts to these arguments:

  • The goal of progressist movements should be, ultimately, to promote some form of well-being. In this light, wellness practices are a way to stay in touch with the long-term goals of the movement. It is short-sighted and productivist to aim to effect “maximal change” without stopping and paying attention to the conditions in which this change takes place and which effect it has on the members of the movement6.
  • We should not accept the “warrior monk” image of tireless activist leaders who give everything they have. It is probably influenced by toxic masculinity, given that many of these charismatic leaders are male. In fact, they would often be better inspired to do less, spend less time in the spotlight, and be aware of their own limits, emotions, and weaknesses. Further, activist movements should make it possible for their members and leaders to express vulnerability instead of pressuring them to project an image of flawlessness. In fact, the common perception that activists must be perfect (in French, “pureté militante”) is really a double standard that we should reject.
  • Typically, activists are in need of wellness, more so than the general population. First, activism is often done in addition to a full-time job, so activists will be more busy than non-activists; further, activists are often overwhelmed because there is too much to do for the cause and not enough helping hands. Second, specifically in activist movements that campaign for the rights of minorities, the members often come from the minorities in question, so this is especially hard for them: they must shoulder both the disadvantages that society imposes to that minority, and the work that must be done in order to effect change.
  • In the long term, movements are not effective if their members burn out. Further, if they are too demanding, then they may also scare away potential newcomers. For this reason as well, paying attention to the wellness of activists is a good long-term strategy for activist movements.

In fact, the book argues that it is necessary for activist movements to openly talk about wellness and care. Indeed, there is a risk that this emotional labor will be done anyway in an invisible fashion (and, disproportionately, by women), and that it will not be recognized. Further, the very act of taking care of oneself and of other community members can be a political act, namely, saying that your well-being matters: especially if you are from a minority that society does not care about.

Building a suitable form of wellness for activists

After defusing this criticism of wellness in an activist context, the book concludes by presenting its end goal: developing a notion of wellness which both addresses the problems pointed out in the first part, and can serve activist movements as explained in the second part. That is, wellness should be compatible with the end goal of activist movements (i.e., with the world that they want to make happen), and also be compatible with the path to get there (i.e., it should help political struggle, make activists stronger, and make activist movements more attractive).

The book offers some general guidelines for wellness practitioners (e.g., teachers):

  • Wellness practitioners should strive at welcoming all people, including those who do not conform to the conventional idea of attractiveness. They should make this explicit and visible in their communication, and focus on exercises that all their participants can do, including those who have a disability. This means that, instead of leaving some behind, wellness should cultivate the art of caring for each other and including everyone (e.g., when going for a walk, going at the pace of the slowest person).
  • Wellness should respect people's boundaries: practitioners should only touch participants with affirmative and easily revocable consent, and making it easy to opt-out or leave instead of being trapped by group dynamics. Of course, in the current majority culture, participants may find it difficult to feel what they genuinely want, or to express their needs: for this reason, wellness practitioners should explore communication approaches that aim at empowering participants. The general idea is that participants should not be asked to ”let go” and passively receive what is offered, but that they should be actively choosing what will happen.
  • Wellness should be horizontal rather than vertical. It should not be organized as an all-knowing teacher having hierarchical power over students. It should be more horizontal, with teachers and participants working towards a common goal. It should also aim at empowering students, making them autonomous in the practice, instead of making them dependent on the teacher's knowledge.
  • Wellness should be financially available to those who need it most, e.g., with fees that depend on revenue. Wellness professionals should also think about how they structure their activity, e.g., investigating cooperative models.
  • Wellness practitioners should be careful about which ideology they promote. For instance, they should eschew the law of attraction which claims that wanting something is enough to get it (hence making individuals responsible for their misery by not “wanting” the right things); they should avoid gender essentialism; etc.
  • Wellness practitioners should be aware of the risk of cultural appropriation. This is the situation where Western practitioners teach non-Western practices (e.g., yoga) and often misunderstand them, or bowdlerize them to be compatible with a Western capitalistic worldview.

The book thus identifies deeper positive functions of wellness that are needed in today's society and in activist movements:

  • Wellness approaches can reconnect us to traditional roots that we have lost in the name of modernity and rationality. Indeed, the use of non-Western esotericism in wellness can be understood in a colonial way. Specifically, we have assimilated non-Western cultures, we have essentialized their exoticism, and we give them the role of helping us escape from our purely rationalist worldview, while still considering them as inferior. In the face of this, wellness practices can help us acknowledge the fact that the path to our own well-being is sometimes beyond the reach of rational thinking.
  • Wellness approaches can reconnect us to our body, and remind us that we are embodied beings. They should make us rediscover pleasure, especially physical pleasure, e.g., via sex positivity. They should encourage us take our time and do less, e.g., via silent walks, meditation, etc. They should free us from the tyranny of having to constantly improve, and leave us space to just live. This goes against a productivist view which makes us forget the needs of our body and tame it to follow the rules of the system. They can also help us change our mindset by making our bodies stronger, training them to take more space rather than being subdued (especially for women and other minorities), and teaching them to defend us (e.g., with self-defense, in particular for women).
  • Wellness approaches can make us aware of the true causes of our suffering, in particular systemic causes. They can also help us support one another with our vulnerabilities. They can also help us notice and accept how we are currently influenced by the system that we wish to change. In so doing, they can lead people towards collective political action.
  • Last, wellness approaches can reconnect us to the importance of spirituality. The book argues for a personal form of spirituality, in particular one intended to connect us to nature. It perceives spirituality as a way to give importance to what matters to us, and thus to support political action.

  1. While it is intuitively obvious, is not completely clear to me why wellness does not typically include the commonly understood notion of medicine, e.g., evidence-based medicine. My intuitive understanding is that people see usual medicine with a kind of “problem-fixing” attitude, e.g., curing a disease or addressing a health issue, rather than as a well-being endeavor. Of course, I guess the distinction can be blurry for some kinds of problems, e.g., chronic pain, mental health and its symptoms (sleep...), general well-being, etc. 

  2. One thing that I did not find in the book is a discussion of how economic development, which has happened simultaneously to the expansion of capitalism, may also have made people happier. Indeed, the harmful effects of capitalism should be compared with the effects of extreme poverty that economic growth is arguably helping to eradicate: e.g., starvation, illness, etc. For instance, the book would say that the wealth of Western countries is what draws people to an individualistic lifestyle which can make them isolated and lonely. Sure; however, poverty-induced promiscuity is certainly also an obstacle to well-being. So we can certainly criticize capitalism and its terrible inequalities in wealth, but it is also important to remember global trends: extreme poverty is decreasing, life expectancy is increasing, etc. Further, it does seem that people are happier in richer countries -- though it is not clear that happiness has been increasing over time. My point is that some of these improvements (e.g., in nutrition and health) are hard to separate from capitalism. Specifically, I doubt we would be happier if we completely reverted to a pre-industrial society (with no medicine, scarce food, none of our modern comforts, etc.): I believe a better goal would be to amplify the positive effects of economic development (e.g., better access to food) while addressing the negative ones (e.g., reducing inequalities, harm to the environment, etc.). 

  3. Coincidentally, the wellness industry seems mostly marketed to (rich) women. This is not just because they are unhappier because of patriarchy: it is also, e.g., because they are more incentivized to take care of their appearance, use beauty products, etc. 

  4. This is again a complicated question: I think the common view is that money tends to make people happier but only up to a certain point. Further, many of the contributing factors to happiness cannot be bought directly (e.g., relationships, health), even if money can make it easier for us to focus on them. In any case, certainly it is naive to believe that the way to be truly happy is simply to pay more for wellness goods and services. (Even if, in our capitalist society, I suspect that investing money for one's well-being can also have a purely performative beneficial effect: when we are buying well-being services, we are effectively telling ourselves that our well-being is something worth paying for.) 

  5. Paradoxically, the rise of individualism seems to go together with the development of a sharing economy where we are more and more willing to trust strangers for rideshares, second-hand clothing, vacation rentals... 

  6. Translating this from activist groups to individuals, the corresponding piece of life advice would be the following: if you are trying to be happy in the long run, but are currently miserable because you are sacrificing your present happiness, then maybe you are doing things wrong. 

by a3nm at November 14, 2023 09:28 PM

October 27, 2023

Antoine Amarilli a.k.a a3nm

Figuring out adversarially that someone understands a given language

This post is about the following hypothetical scenario: Alice is suspected to be a spy from a foreign country, and so to be fluent in the language spoken in that country, called language L. Alice claims to be an innocent citizen with no knowledge whatsoever of language L. Of course, this is just what a spy would say!

You are in charge of interrogating Alice, and to figure out whether she is fluent in L or not. How do you do it?

Of course, you may be lucky and Alice could inadvertently out herself as an L speaker. For instance, she may use an L word accidentally1 (e.g., cursing, or counting out loud2, etc.3). Your task is also very easy if Alice has a thick L accent in the language that you share with her. But what is Alice is perfectly prepared, perfectly fluent in your language, and you cannot count on her to make a spontaneous mistake? Of course we want to avoid mistreating Alice (she might be innocent), and we can assume that she will reasonably cooperate with the interrogator (like an innocently accused citizen who wants to prove their innocence).

Here are some ideas of solutions to this problem: thanks to louis, Ted, olasd, and Tito for contributing some. There are also some solutions here which are already mentioned in a TVtropes entry with a wider scope)4; but maybe there are other possibilities.

Brain imaging

With access to enough technology, there is a solution which is probably foolproof and requires no cooperation from Alice. Just put her in a neuroimaging machine, and have her listen to spoken recordings in language L. By comparing with a language that she knows, and with a language that she doesn't, it should be possible to detect whether her brain is making sense of what she hears or not. (I'm no expert in neurosciences though, so I cannot promise this would work.)

In what follows, I consider this to be cheating: I assume we don't have out-of-band access to Alice's brain, and that we must test her via normal sensory interfaces.

The Stroop test

The Stroop test is the following task: you are presented with a sequence of color names which are themselves written in a different color (e.g., it could contain the word "blue" but written in red), and you must read the sequence of the colors in which the words are written (not read the words themselves). This turns out to be difficult, with people often messing up and reading the words instead of naming the colors. But of course the Stroop effect only works if the person knows the language in which the words are written.

So if Alice's performance on this task is different between color words in language L and nonsense words, then you can find out that she is familiar with language L. The Stroop test may in fact have been used for this purpose historically, as discussed in this skeptics.SE question.

Alice may be able to evade detection by deliberately slowing down on nonsense words to try to match her performance on L words -- and in particular to make sure that she never ever translates an L word, which would be a dead giveaway. However, I would assume that maintaining exactly the same performance (and same error profile) between genuine mistakes (on nonsense words) and contrived mistakes (on words of L) would be very challenging for Alice. Especially if you collect precise timings on her performance that she herself does not have access to.

Timing attacks

A generalization of this idea is to measure Alice's performance on other tasks involving both L words and nonsense words, and seeing if her performance is different across both classes. Like, test Alice's ability to memorize short phrases, some of which are made of nonsense words and some of which are well-formed sentences in L. Of course if Alice is fluent in L the second task would be far easier for her.

I guess one can come up with similar tasks, e.g., if L uses an ideogram writing system, I would expect that it would be easier, say, to find differences between two figures, or find occurrences of a figure in another figure, or other such tasks, whenever the figures used in the task are genuine L ideograms as opposed to similar-looking but nonsense ideograms.

This is a bit like a timing attack in computer security. It also resembles a bit the implicit association test, though I find it difficult to adapt this specific test to a task for Alice that would also make sense if Alice has no knowledge of L whatsoever.

Following verbal instructions

Another idea is to have Alice play a game where she must follow instructions as quickly as possible. The catch is that some of the instructions are nonsense instructions, and some are instructions in language L. If Alice spontaneously reacts to one of the language L instructions, then she is unmasked. Playing this correctly if you understand language L is a bit like a Simons Says game, whereas of course it is not especially difficult if you do not know language L. Of course, Alice may again be able to avoid detection by deliberately slowing down.

A similar idea is mentioned in the TVtropes entry mentioned above, about a possibly apocryphal practice by the British of shouting "Achtung!" to identify German spies. Of course variations of this idea can work if you are not overtly interrogating Alice but watching her without her knowledge, which I would also consider as cheating.

A related idea: inserting words from L in conversation, using them as loanwords, and seeing in conversation whether Alice understands one of them (i.e., forgot to pretend she didn't). A related strategy (asking a question in French in the middle of an interview in Spanish) was used by Ladislas de Hoyos to identify Klaus Barbie while he posed as the non-French-speaking Klaus Altmann.

Watermarked language

Another idea hidden in plain sight: how about giving some classes to Alice where you teach her language L, and see how she performs? If she doesn't react like a real beginner would, in particular if she uses just one word that you hadn't already taught her, then she is unmasked.

There is a meaner variation on this idea, but which requires much more preparation. You could design and teach Alice a constructed language L', which is very similar to L except that it is "watermarked" in many small ways that are difficult to remember5, e.g., the orthography of some words is subtly different, some words have been exchanged, etc. If Alice is a spy, you would expect her to mess up at least some of the time with errors influenced by L. By contrast, if Alice is innocent, the errors she makes would not be correlated to L.

This is not a very practical solution, and also I don't know whether it would work in practice. Still, if it does, I find it interesting that knowing something (L) may be a handicap in properly learning something else (L').

An explicit solution

To finish with an entirely different idea, another way is watch for a physiological response: read some erotic literature in language L to Alice and see if she becomes excited. Ironically, this very low-tech solution comes from a science fiction short story: I'm in Marsport Without Hilda, by Isaac Asimov.

Other involuntary reactions to language could also work, e.g., laughter (e.g., with jokes), disgust (e.g., with gruesome descriptions), anger (e.g., with insults), etc.


  1. There is a scene like this in the movie Inglourious Basterds where an undercover British agent is unmasked because he uses the wrong hand gesture to order beer. 

  2. Somehow I didn't find a standard name for the observation that even fluent speakers of a foreign language will often spontaneously revert to their native language when they are counting out loud. Yet, this seems obvious to me based on personal experience (from myself and others), and it's not hard to find people discussing this on the Web. 

  3. One example from my own native language: in French, the word "enfin" (in this context pronounced "'fin" /fɛ̃/) can be used (among other things) to take back something you just said, as a kind of verbal backspace key. Like "I mean" in the following utterance: "He looked pretty happy, I mean, not super happy, but...". From personal experience, some native French speakers, even when fluent in English, may mess up and use "enfin" in the middle of an English sentence. 

  4. I found that webpage because it is (up to duplicates) the only occurrence found by Google Search of the terms "Stroop test" and "Marsport without Hilda" (which I mention in my proposed solutions). This suggests to me that the problem I discuss here doesn't seem to have been widely addressed elsewhere. 

  5. A bit like trap streets in maps. 

by a3nm at October 27, 2023 08:31 PM

September 17, 2023

Antoine Amarilli a.k.a a3nm

Double-blind reviewing

More and more conferences in theoretical computer science (TCS) are moving to double-blind peer review. This is the implementation of peer review where the reviewers who evaluate submitted articles do not know the identity of paper authors, at least initially. The two major database theory conferences have adopted double-blind peer review (at least in an "experimental" way): PODS since 2023 and ICDT since 2024. Among general theoretical computer science conferences, we have ESA since 2019, STACS since 2021, ICALP since 2022, FOCS since 2022, SODA since 2022, STOC since 2024, and ITCS since 2024. An up-to-date list is maintained on double-blind.org. However, double-blind reviewing is not yet used in all conferences in all subareas of TCS. Further, it is also not commonly used in journals. In fact, I do not know of TCS journals that use double-blind peer review, except TODS which has used it since 2006 with a detailed rationale. See also the discussion of this issue at SoCG, which uses double-blind reviewing since 2023.

I think that this move to double-blind reviewing is a welcome change, and thought I'd try to summarize some of my thoughts about it.

First: should conferences and journals adopt double-blind reviewing? The implicit premise behind double-blind reviewing is that reviewers should evaluate articles based on their intrinsic merits, so that the identity and affiliations of the authors are not relevant for evaluation. When discussing double-blind reviewing, I think it is important to check first if all parties agree about this point. Indeed, this view is not universal: some researchers insist that it would be normal for conferences to evaluate submissions by newcomers with higher standards (see, for instance, this answer on academia.SE); or to the contrary conferences could be more welcoming towards outsiders1. However, if you believe, like TODS, that "every submission should be judged on its own merits", then information about the authors and their affiliations is indeed irrelevant to reviewers (assuming they have no conflicts of interest — see below). The question becomes: does hiding this information make a difference, and is the difference sufficient to justify the change.

Second: how much of a difference does double-blinding make? This is not, in fact, straightforward to evaluate. There has been decades of debate on this topic, and policies have been adopted by scholarly associations in many fields, given that double-blind peer review has been around since the 1950s (according to Wikipedia). Further, many scientific studies have attempted to quantify its effectiveness. The TODS rationale contains some pointers to this literature, and after 2006 one can find many other articles arguing for or against double-blind peer review (see for instance this one and the many articles that it cites or that cite it). Of course, the effectiveness of double-blind reviewing may depend on the community, or on how specifically it is implemented. In computer science, one influential data point was the 2017 WSDM experiment, in which submissions were scored by double-blind reviewers and by single-blind reviewers (i.e., who knew the identity and affiliation of authors). The experiment found that "single-blind reviewing confers a significant advantage to papers with famous authors and authors from high-prestige institutions". Here I must confess that I have not myself read all these works: my point is just that the issue is not simple, and that you cannot dismiss double-blind reviewing simply because you are unfamiliar with it or because you are personally convinced that it does not work.

Third: how should double-blind reviewing be implemented? Here, there is an idea I'd really like to get across: making reviewing "double-blind" does not necessarily mean that it should be impossible for reviewers to deanonymize authors. Indeed, essentially all2 conferences in the list above are using one specific implementation, called lightweight double-blind reviewing. This means that, while papers should not contain identifying details, and while reviewers are advised not to try to identify authors, it is OK if reviewers happen to find out about who the authors are. In particular, authors are encouraged to post their work, e.g., on preprint servers, even if this means a reviewer may find it (deliberately, or accidentally, e.g., by stumbling upon the work before reviewing). Lightweight double-blind reviewing still offers two important benefits:

  • Reviewers are not immediately biased by reading the author names and affiliations on the first page of the paper. In my personal experience as a reviewer, seeing familiar names or affiliations on a paper will immediately affect my impression of the paper and my expectation about the outcome ("probably accept unless the contents are a bad surprise" vs "probably reject unless the contents are a good surprise"). I would like not to be influenced by this, but I doubt I can avoid it, so I prefer not to see the information3.
  • Authors who worry about discrimination and do not trust the reviewers can choose to take steps to be completely anonymous, e.g., they can choose not to post preprints of their work.

By contrast, I do not like double-blind policies that try to guarantee complete anonymity of submissions at all costs, e.g., by prohibiting or discouraging the posting of papers as a preprints, informal talks, etc. I believe this is harmful, because it means that papers are only available when they are finally published4 — by contrast, preprints are immediately accessible to everyone. Unfortunately, there are conferences (especially practical conferences) that follow this route, e.g., SIGMOD 20245. Disallowing preprints can have a chilling effect on an entire field: as papers often end up rejected from a conference and resubmitted at another, authors may eschew the posting of preprints because of the risk that some ulterior, unspecified conference may disqualify their work on these grounds.

Fourth: What are the real problems with double-blind reviewing? Many of the criticism I have heard does not make sense to me:

  • "Anonymizing papers is tedious work." This I really don't understand: removing author names is trivial, writing self-citations in the third person (e.g., "The previous work of Myself et al." vs "Our previous work") feels weird but takes a few seconds... Altogether the impact seems to be minimal6.
  • "It it complicated to host/submit supplementary data, e.g., source code or experiments, in an anonymous fashion." But there are tools like Anonymous GitHub, and guides on what you can do.
  • "Double-blind reviewing is not perfect, and reviewers can guess who the authors are." Well, first, guessing is not the same as being sure; second, it's still useful if you can remove bias in some cases. An improvement can be valuable even if it is not a perfect solution.
  • "It's unnecessary, everyone is honest and exempt of bias." Even assuming that reviewers try to be fair, this misses the point that bias is often unconscious.

To me, the real (minor) shortcomings of double-blind reviewing are:

  • Some journals (and conferences?) are "epijournals", where papers are first submitted to a preprint server, and then reviewed by the journal (and endorsed if they pass peer review). I think this is a great practice, that neatly separates the hosting of papers (which is done for free by preprint servers) from the evaluation process. Unfortunately the interaction with double-blind peer review is not perfect: you cannot send the preprint to reviewers, because of course it includes author information. The fix is obvious, just a bit inelegant: simply ask authors for an extra blinded version of the paper when they submit it for evaluation by the journal.
  • The management of conflicts of interest (COIs) is more complicated. Many conferences and journals have policies to ensure that papers are not reviewed by colleagues, collaborators, supervisors, or personal friends of the authors — or, of course, the authors themselves! When reviewers know who the authors are, they can easily detect COIs and recuse themselves from reviewing the paper. With double-blind reviewing, this is more complicated. Typical solutions include asking authors upon submission to disclose with which members of the program committee (PC) they are in COI, and/or asking PC members to disclose with which authors they are in COI (during the bidding phase). But these are not easy to adapt to journals, where papers are typically sent to editors not affiliated to the journal. Or, for conferences, it does not address subreviewing, where PC members delegate a paper to an outside expert: this expert could end up being in COI with the authors, or be one of the authors, which is especially embarrassing. This is typically handled either by unblinding papers from PC members if they decide to subreview a paper, or by making subreview invitations pass through an unblinded party (e.g., the PC, or a specific organizer not involved in reviewing) who can check for the absence of COI7.

I hope this post can help clarify some points about double-blind reviewing, and maybe encourage more conferences and journals to consider it!


  1. To put it in another way: there are many academic events that are invitation-only, and many public conferences include some invited talks that have been nominatively selected. Whether this is OK or not, and what is the right balance, is a different question. But conferences who make an open call for contributions should be clear about whether they commit to treat submissions from everyone in the same way, or whether some authors are more equal than others

  2. The exceptions are ICDT, which uses the same concept but does not give the name; and FOCS, which does not give specific details about implementation but which I would expect to follow the lead of other conferences. 

  3. I don't know if all reviewers approach their job in the same way, but personally, I'm always worried about misjudging a paper — e.g., be the lone reviewer to advocate for rejection when the others reviewers have better reasons to accept it, or vice-versa. (On reviewing platforms I have used, reviewers typically cannot see the other reviews on a submission before inputting their own — thus forcing them to come up with their own independent assessment.) Of course, it doesn't all come down to the grade, but an important question remains as I read the paper: how will I evaluate it in the end? And I observe myself looking for clues that could give away how other reviewers are likely to evaluate it, e.g., the formatting, the writing quality — or, indeed, the identity of the authors. The same goes for originality: I suspect that a paper that looks very unconventional may end up being rejected just because the reviewers will think that others will not take it seriously (a kind of reverse Schelling point). Unfortunately, I further suspect that this phenomenon is encouraging papers to be more conformist and to avoid standing out, in a kind of herd-like behavior. 

  4. Of course, the final published version will often not actually be available to everyone. So it is especially important to encourage authors to post preprints (and postprints!) of their work. 

  5. The specific wording is: "we request that the authors refrain from publicizing and uploading versions of their submitted manuscripts to pre-publication servers, such as arXiv". That said, later, the call for paper grudgingly concedes that papers can still be submitted if there is an online preprint. 

  6. If we're trying to streamline the publication process, one more immediate area for improvement would be to fix the duplication of effort between submitting preprints (e.g., on arXiv), and submitting "camera-ready versions" of papers that often have a limited page counts and other inessential differences. Or: harmonizing paper stylesheets (e.g., using LIPIcs) and page limits (or removing strict page limits altogether), so as to avoid tedious reformatting work when resubmitting a paper to a different conference. I have spent orders of magnitude more time on busywork of this kind than I have ever spent on the anonymous-vs-nonanonymous question. 

  7. About COIs, by the way: I wish we eventually have a platform to handle these more automatically. Knowing that researchers are often (alas, not always) disambiguated with a unique ORCID identifier, and that there are bibliographic databases (e.g., DBLP for computer science, or Crossref or BASE) with co-authorship information, many COIs nowadays can be detected from public, structured data. This can be refined with affiliation information (sometimes from email addresses, or from ORCID records or sometimes from DBLP), and supervision information (e.g., the Mathematics Genealogy Project). Sure, there are also COIs arising from close personal friendships or other undetectable causes... but it would be nice if manual handling were limited to these — or they could also be given by authors and stored by some trusted third party. Such a system would be useful, like how the Toronto Paper Matching System (TPMS) (cf reference) is streamlining the paper bidding phase for large AI conferences. 

by a3nm at September 17, 2023 04:18 PM