Some thoughts after QIP reviews....

 Peer reviews of the quantum cryptography community at the moment:

Reviewers from other areas: "Not my area, not interested, so reject"

Reviewers from our own area: "I can understand your high-level techniques, so that makes your paper trivial."

This toxicity has been giving me depression and nihilism for quite a while. 

In the reviews for each of my QIP submission, I got a 1-sentence review that simply summarizes the paper (or even says some good things! ) but gives a "weak reject" for no reason. This is not surprising by the historically consistent high-entropy of QIP reviews from people outside your area.

What surprises and saddens me at most is this one reviewer, clearly from our own area because they actually understand what we do on a high-level, who, however, gives ridiculous reasons for weak rejection:

1. They believe the statement we prove is highly-expected to be true by the community. 

 ---Aren't a lot of important theorems highly expected to be true? This doesn't make the proof trivial! 

If so, we should have P!=NP proved a long time ago.

Secondly, there's never any agreement in our community that this result is highly expected.

2. They believe the techniques are a bit niche and maybe tailored to prove this specific result.

------ First, it's hard to know whether a paper's techniques are actually applicable to other problems without even trying. A lot of people obtain new results by digging out niche techniques that haven't been used by other people. This opinion on whether the techniques are applicable is very arbitrary. 

Second, many papers with good results actually use niche techniques too, but at least they prove one important statement, which is the case of our paper.

I'm no big shot or rising star, so probably no one would care about whatever I say. But I will just say them anyway. I hope like-minded people will feel related to this post.

Living in this world where everything is monetized as idealists (which most theorists are) is already difficult. We idealists shouldn’t be so harsh on each other. 

Well, true—theorists may have high egos and each idealist may have a different ideal, and that’s probably why we incur all this reviewer-2 harm on each other. But if we really get to the bottom, we would see that few of us are actually working on problems universally agreed by the entire community to be important. By "agreed by the entire community", I mean literally agreed by everyone, foundational problems like P != NP and problems highly connected to real life such as whether lattice assumptions are post-quantum secure. Because these problems are super hard, and we have to make a living where KPI is publishing. 

I’m definitely against mass-writing papers or wrapping up trash results as something cool to sell. But I’m also against elitist egoism that treats all others people’s research as trash, simply because it’s not the problem they work on themselves. Few of us are working on the universally agreed important problems anyway (at least not full-time).  

How about treating each other in the community better, so that we can all make a living and then have time to work together on really important problems?

If you believe that artificially crafted, niche problem you work on is really an important problem of our era, and you will eventually be our generation’s Turing/Godel, I won’t object, and I sincerely hope it’s true. But you don’t have to be mean to others to demonstrate your intellectual superiority. Time will eventually prove the importance of your work; your bad opinions on others won’t. Plus, by a symmetric reasoning, you probably never know the paper containing solid but relatively niche techniques you write bad reviews on is in fact a revolutionary paper (e.g. Simon’s algorithm).

There should be some middle-ground between extreme elitism, egoism and mass-producing trash papers.  One can have excellent research taste without being too mean to others. 

I know all this toxicity not just exists in quantum crypto, but peer reviews in general.

I don’t know many good ideas to improve the peer review dilemma. 

But I know probably the only way to make myself happy is to become a “crank” in some sense: an imbecile who does not care about any other people’s opinions and judgements; a crazy person who believes their own research is the best. Meanwhile, I don’t want to be harsh on others’ research as some reviewers did to me. I’d like to appreciate others’ work.

To obtain such a divine mindset is not easy, wish me good luck…..