Editors of academic journals have been reporting that they find it increasingly hard to secure referees for papers that have been submitted to their journals. When I’ve been discussing this issue over the years with colleagues, I’ve heard a few remarks that made me wonder what our considerations are to decide whether or not to accept a review request. Clearly, there must be a content-wise fit: if one thinks the paper is outside one’s area of expertise, one should not accept the referee request. But then I have heard considerations such as “I decline because I have already refereed for this journal before”, or “I referee as many papers as I receive reports”, or “I referee 5 papers a year”. Are these valid reasons to decline?

Clearly, the answer cannot be that how much we choose to referee is purely a private affair. All academics would benefit if there would not be a shortage of referees, hence it cannot be a purely private affair. Yet the referee shortage takes the structure of a collective action problem. And we know that there are two principle ways to address collective action problems – either by having a collective decision maker (such as the government), which is not a solution available for this problem; or else by way of establishing a social norm.

Solving the referee crisis in academic peer review will require multiple measures, but when it comes to securing that enough people are willing to referee, I propose to discuss the number we should treat as the lower boundary of how much we should referee. Let’s call the number of reports a person writes for journals divided by the number of reports that person receives in response to their own paper submissions a person’s referee-ratio. I want to defend that the referee ratio should be at least 1.2. In other words, for every 4 reports we receive, we should write at least 5 (adjusted for the number of authors of a paper).

Why is that number not 1, as some seem to think? The first reason is that there are a number of reports being written by authors who will not be able to [fully] reciprocate. Think of PhD-students who submit their work, but are too junior to review themselves (they may become more sufficiently experienced towards the end of their PhD-trajectory, but I think it’s a reasonable assumption that some people submit to journals who do not have the skills and expertise (yet) to serve as referees). Some of them will submit for a few years and then stop doing academic research, and will at that point no longer be part of the system of peer-review.

The second reason is that there might be authors who temporarily should not be expected to reciprocate. I am thinking in particular of editors of journals, and associate editors with significant work loads, who are doing crucial work in making the system run in the first place. But if we agree on this, then it might well be the case that the minimal referee ratio should be 1.5 rather than 1.2 – I am not sure.

The third reason is that the system needs a bit of buffer in order to function. We need some oil to make the machine run smoothly. If everyone were to agree to adopt as a social norm that we should seek to have a referee ratio of minimally 1.2, then there would be more scholars who receive a referee request who would accept because the social norm tells them they should accept.

It is actually pretty easy to calculate our own referee ratio. Many people keep track of the papers they have refereed, often as part of their annual assessment conversations with their line managers. And it’s also quite easy to keep track of (or reconstruct for the past) the number of reports we have received. It might take us a few hours, but the potential objection that this is too burdensome isn’t very strong, I’d think.

My hope is that agreeing on a minimal referee ratio would help address the referee shortage problem. But it will also address the issue that some people are, qua character, much more prone to feel guilty if they decline a referee request. I am sadly in that camp (I generally blame it on having been raised in a Catholic culture). It has led to much agonizing, and contributed to an excessive work load, which has negatively affected my health. Once, when I was close to burn-out, I had a coach who told me to protect myself by quantifying upper limits to my professional commitments, because otherwise they would crush me. In short, people who are insufficiently able to say ‘no’ might be helped if they make the calculation and see their referee ratio is not around 1 but rather way over 2.

There are two alternatives that I can think of. One is to pay referees. But there are at least three reasons against this. First, it would increase the bureaucracy and paperwork involved in refereeing. Second, it is quite unfair against a background of huge inequalities in financial resources, especially on a global scale, but even within continents and countries. Third, it would commodify another aspect of academia – is this something we should want?

There are other strategies that journals can use that are complementary. Some journals now state that one can only submit if one is also willing to review for that journal; to me that seems absolutely reasonable. But if that were our only expression of reciprocity-duties, it would be too strict; for example, given my theoretical/conceptual expertise on the capability approach, I’ve reviewed papers that used that framework for a number of journals from other disciplines (such as Social Sciences and Medicine). So I think we should, to some extent, also be willing to review for journals that we will most likely never submit to, because it helps colleagues in other disciplines.

It might be that the number of 1.2 is not the right one. Perhaps it should be 1.5, or even 2. But the prior question is whether we agree there should be such a number that functions as a professional social norm. Or is there a better way to solve the referee crisis?

How different are these two streaks?

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Anyone who thinks AI endangers poets should first prove that there exists a poetry journal with more readers than contributors.

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Sometimes I look out the window and think of how many babies are now part of a personal brand.

Ezra Klein has a long interview today about governance with Steve Teles and Jennifer Pahlka. The gist is that our government bureaucracies really are terrible and liberals are in denial about the need for massive reform. It left me with many thoughts because I think, overall, it hit the wrong targets.

It's hard to adopt just the right tone for this because, God knows, big bureaucracies have lots of problems and liberals aren't always willing to face up to them. I'm really not trying to be a big defender of the bureaucracy here. But maybe a little one? This turned out to be very long, so let's take it in small pieces.

KLEIN [on defending institutions]: The core conflict right now, the irresolvable one, the ones that two parties will not compromise on, is over institutions: Democrats staff and defend them. Republicans loathe and seek to raze them to the ground.

This is nothing new. Remember when William F. Buckley said he'd rather be governed by 2,000 random names from the Boston telephone book than the faculty of Harvard? That was 1963. As a possible explanation for the recent travails of the Democratic Party it really doesn't work.

PAHLKA [On the disconnect between policy and delivery]: Probably the biggest example of it would be the Biden administration’s insistence on the success of the big bills that were passed — the CHIPS Act, the Inflation Reduction Act, infrastructure, where they are incredible accomplishments legislatively. And if you look at it from that perspective, he is absolutely a hero. But if you look at from the perspective of people in states in the U.S. whose economies have been hollowed out: It took so long to get that money out the door.

This just isn't true. First, here's construction spending after the CHIPS Act:

That's fast! And despite lots of early warnings, new fabs have been opening on time and on budget. Second, here's estimated IRA spending on green energy projects:

This represents about two-thirds of the total authorized. It's going out the door and being used about as fast as you could hope for with such enormous sums.

Third, the infrastructure bill. The headline number is that it was a $1.2 trillion bill. But that's grossly misleading. It allocated only $550 billion in new funding, and as always, that's over a decade. It's really a $55 billion bill, and that money is being spent just fine.

KLEIN [on nothing ever getting done]: The first contract to build the New York subways was awarded in 1900. Four years later — four years — the first 28 stations opened.

Compare that to now. In 2009, Democrats passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, pumping billions into high-speed rail. Fifteen years later, you cannot board a high-speed train funded by that bill anywhere in the country.

So, yeah: I’m worried about our institutions. I’m angry at our institutions. I don’t want to defend them. I want them to work.

Well, yes, but I don't think this is due to dysfunctional liberal bureaucracies. It's due to a different liberal delusion: the unshakable belief that America desperately needs lots of high-speed rail. This has been going on for 60 years, not just 15, and we still have no high-speed rail.

The bureaucracy isn't at fault for this. It would happily dole out the money for HSR if it was truly a priority for anyone. But it's not. California is ground zero for HSR boondoggles, and only a part of that can be blamed on inefficient bureaucratic rules—though there are plenty of those. Mostly it can be blamed on voters and politicians who have succumbed to hazy liberal dreams of gleaming trains that have no basis in reality.

TELES [on why bureaucracies deteriorate]: Things go wrong. There’s a scandal. We add a new process, we add a new procedure — without really thinking about how it interacts with all the rest of it. And so we shouldn’t necessarily think that the problems that Jen is describing are a result of the fact that anybody designed this thing to operate this way. It’s really the result of just additional layers of accretion without corresponding layers of destruction.

This is true. When we set out to build things these days there are lots of hoops to jump through. The project has to be let out to competitive bidding. You have to write an environmental impact report. Maybe you have to ensure some of the work is done by small businesses. There are minority set asides. Buy American provisions. Zoning variances. Environmental justice requirements. Public comment periods for new rulemaking. Grievance procedures for anyone who's unhappy. Etc.

But with few exceptions these hurdles have nothing to do with the bureaucracy per se. They're put in place by legislators at all levels. Liberals want to ensure social fairness. Conservatives want to make sure liberal interest groups can't cheat. Local politicos want to retain power. And everyone wants to make sure nothing objectionable happens near their own house.

This is where the blame lies. Bureaucracies themselves are just the unlucky bastards who are forced to make it all work.

PAHLKA [on outside forces]: We’re skipping over a really important point here that Steve touched on when he mentioned scandal, which is the adversarial nature of all this.... Steve was referring to that earlier, sort of the ’60s and ’70s that’s still very much in our DNA as Democrats — that is to sue, sue, sue. Well, if we sue, sue, sue all the time for all sorts of reasons —

Suing government, here, you mean?

PAHLKA: Exactly. Suing the government. Then every time we sue, we make the government more risk averse. There’s a lot of adversarialism out there, and the natural result of that is going to be a system in which you defend your judgments by using no judgment.

No argument here. This is absolutely a problem—though it's pretty ecumenical these days. Block a rich person's view and they sue over some alleged deficiency in the EIR. Build something near a poor neighborhood and liberal interest groups will sue. Build near a residential area and owners will sue over increased traffic. Violate someone's notion of government overreach and conservative interest groups will sue. Award a contract and the losers will sue.

But—this is obviously a broad problem that bureaucracies themselves do nothing to cause. All they can do is react, and it's true that sometimes the reaction can be a sort of fetal crouch where dotting i's becomes far too important.

If you want to solve this, the answer lies mostly in legislation that rolls back protections a bit and provides safe harbors if the truly important rules are followed.

KLEIN [on the problems with big cities governed by Democrats]: I was looking at some election results. And it was weighting the shift in the vote by the density of the place. And what it shows is that in the most dense places, which is to say the big cities, the vote turned against Democrats the most... These are places where people were very exposed to blue state governance, exposed to the cost of living, exposed to housing crises, exposed to disorder on the streets, homeless encampments.

I doubt very much that this is responsible for a sudden shift over the past four years. More likely it's due to the fact that Kamala Harris didn't campaign in these places and lots of Democrats in deep blue cities stayed home because they knew their votes didn't matter. The obsessive coverage this year of the seven swing states as the only ones that mattered may have had something to do with it.

But I want to make a larger point. It's true that big cities have deteriorated over the decades, but it's a couple of big trends that are largely responsible for this. The first is also the most obvious: Both the rich and the upper middle class have increasingly disengaged from cities, partly by moving to the suburbs and partly by segregating themselves into gated enclaves where they can shut out the problems of urban life. This has left central cities increasingly subject to the pathologies of the poor, the poorly educated, and the homeless.

Second, the poor communities themselves have deteriorated. In the past, the smartest and most capable of the poor stayed put their entire lives because no other options were open to them. They ended up as the natural leaders of these communities. But no longer. We've gotten too good and too aggressive at identifying these people and sending them to college—where they become part of the middle class and move away. As a result, central cities are left rudderless and even poorer.

These problems obviously have nothing to do with governance, either red or blue. It's just the way things are.

TELES [on the high cost of building stuff]: A piece by Leah Brooks and Zach Liscow...shows in exhaustive detail just how much the costs of building infrastructure in the U.S. have gone up, which Jen was talking about earlier. And they demonstrate that the explanation for that increase, which I think is behind a lot of Americans’ sense that nothing works, is citizen voice. That there’s so many opportunities for often quite minoritarian intervention in building things, that everything takes very long. It takes a lot more. And the other thing is government doesn’t get big wins that translate into trust and a willingness to invest it with new resources.

"Citizen voice." Not bureaucracy. Beyond that, though, I'm a big fan of this chart:

New York City has astronomical infrastructure costs. But more broadly, the US is fairly middling. There's a popular myth that America has fantastically higher building costs than other countries, but it's largely based on (a) New York City, which gets a ton of media coverage; (b) comparison of a few high-profile HSR projects; and (c) massive building throughout China, where the government doesn't have to care about public approval. Overall, though, it really is mostly a myth. There's probably a kernel of truth to it because America really is a litigious nation, but no more than that.

Here's a story: FEMA has long handed out money to disaster victims, but in the past they required people to spend it only on approved things. If you ran out and needed more you had to show receipts that demonstrated you had followed the rules.

Then they decided this was dumb and rescinded the rule. That's an example of a bureaucracy killing a regulation on its own. It can be done.

But it also opens up FEMA to blowback. Someday an activist group is going to collect evidence of fraud and hand it to a friendly politician, who is then going to demand hearings that generate blaring headlines about millions of wasted taxpayer dollars. You can practically see it in your mind's eye already.

And it's not as if the criticism will be wrong. You'd like to think that people could be relied on to use common sense, but they can't be and we all know it. It would be nice, for example, if all we had to tell restaurant managers was, For God's sake, just make sure the place is clean and the refrigerator works and employees wash their hands. But as we become richer we also become more risk averse. That means lots of detailed rules—the refrigerator must close automatically and contain separate areas for meat and vegetables and run at 34-36°F and shelving must be stainless steel. This is not the bureaucracy at work. This is the result of the public reading The Jungle and Silent Spring and Food Politics and demanding action. At the same time we also demand that cheating can't be allowed. And the environment be kept clean. And the workplace be safe. And residents have some say in what gets built next door. So we demand politicians pass some rules about this and naturally they do what they're told.

This doesn't always turn out the way we'd like. But it's not really the fault of the bureaucracy. For that, we just need to look in the mirror.

On May 21, 1946, the Canadian physicist Louis Slotin was demonstrating to several other Los Alamos scientists how to do a criticality experiment. Slotin wasn’t really doing an experiment at the time, in the sense of taking careful scientific measurements — he was simply showing how one would do them, because he was about to leave the laboratory to be part of the assembly team for the first postwar nuclear weapons test at the Bikini atoll, and they were going to be taking over the experimental work for him while he was gone. In front of him was a beryllium hemisphere (a neutron reflector), with a plutonium weapon core inside of it. In his left hand he held another beryllium hemisphere, with his thumb reaching into a hole in the top, and using a screwdriver as leverage, he carefully lowered the top hemisphere over the core. As he did so, the neutrons exiting the core began to reflect back into it, increasing the overall reactivity of the system.

And then… the screwdriver slipped. The top hemisphere slid over the plutonium, and it tipped just slightly over the edge of prompt criticality, creating a brief but intense nuclear reaction that showered Slotin and those around him with radiation and created a brief flash of blue light in the air around them. In less than a second, Slotin had reflexively knocked the top hemisphere off, and the reaction had stopped, but it was too late: he was walking dead, having absorbed enough radiation to kill him horribly and painfully within nine days.

The story of the so-called “Demon Core,” which was involved in two criticality accidents — the one that killed Slotin, and another, different accident that killed another scientist, Harry Daghlian, a year before — is part of the lore of the atomic age. A fictionalized version of the accidents was featured in the very first Hollywood film about the Manhattan Project (MGM’s The Beginning or the End?, from 1947), as well as in the 1989 film Fat Man and Little Boy. And over the years there have been many non-fiction accounts of the accident, with ever more details emerging over time; if you do want more details on the accident, the core, and the aftermath, you might take a look at an article I published on it a few years back, for example.

What really has fascinated me about the Slotin accident in particular, though, is the emergence of an entire ecosystem of “memes” about it. The first one I can remember seeing in this one, in 2019:

You could, at the time, only buy it on a T-shirt from someone on Etsy based out of Japan, but now there are a million knock-off/duplicates available on the Internet. I don’t know who the original author was, but at the time I was pretty amazed at it — it felt like something of a “deep cut,” because you had to recognize the entire Slotin set-up in order to see why this somewhat kawaii rendering of the Slotin experiment, along with the “I love science” phrasing, was a form of dark humor.

I don’t remember seeing “Demon Core” memes prior to the above. I am sure one can find earlier ones — that was just the first one that came across my computer screen. Google Trends has some interesting results on this:

The above is showing the relative search volume of three terms: “Louis Slotin” (red, always very low), “Demon Core” (blue, interesting spikes, and a growing relevancy from 2019 onward), and “NUKEMAP” (yellow, included as something of a “control” — something I consider “somewhat well-known in certain circles” but not “universally well-known”; about 1/4th of my engineering-school freshmen this year had heard of the NUKEMAP before taking any courses with me). My reading of this is that the “Demon Core” was still pretty obscure among non-nuke-nerds until around 2019/2020, when it “broke through” some barrier and is now something that can readily referenced online and you would expect a significant fraction of the readership (esp. geeky boys, I imagine) to recognize.

Since 2019 or so there has been an, er, explosion of “Demon Core”/Slotin experiment memes. The veritable source Know-Your-Meme created a dedicated “Demon Core” page in May 2021, showcasing some of the variety of the meme. Most of the initial ones seem to be of the same sort of kawaii (Japanese for “cute”) model as the one above, transporting it into a context of anime girls, cats, and anime cat girls:

What is going on here? I am not exceptionally well-versed in anime or manga tropes, but I think the “obvious” reading of this is a classic case of “unexpected juxtaposition creates humor.” That is, moving something from one context (“Demon Core,” radiation experiment, horrible death) into another (cute, anime, girls) creates something that feels novel and unusual. One could no doubt analyze many different dimensions of juxtaposition at work here, including the gender roles: Slotin was not just male, but the entire accident was caused by the sort of risk-taking bravado (which had he been explicitly warned about) that anyone who has spent time as or around young men recognizes immediately. So having a cute Japanese schoolgirl performing this very male-coded experiment is quite a switch in tone — and one that probably also is dually resonant with the “geeky boy” demographic that I suspect is largely the primary “receiver” and “transmitter” of the meme.

The Slotin accident has also achieved, in recent years, that “sweet spot” of “if you know, you know” virality: it’s not so well-known that everyone would get it, but it’s also not so obscure that only dedicated wonks or experts would know about it (a reference to the Kelley accident, or the SL-1 accident, would be probably too deep a cut to go viral).

I have not made a full survey or taxonomy of these memes; there are dozens and dozens, if not more. The ones above I would categorize as “entirely new drawings,” in which the Demon Core pictures are used as reference, but the entire style is novel. There also cases where the Demon Core pictures (or self-serious drawings/renderings of the experiment) are added to existing meme formats, such as the “pondering my orb” wizard:

There is also quite a few of the “take a stock photograph of a product and add the Demon Core to it” variety:

And so on — there are an almost unlimited number. There are arguably no tasteful versions of this meme, of course. (XKCD, perhaps, comes closest.) Because it’s a meme derived from human suffering. It’s meant to be in bad taste — that’s the source of the humor.

The medical details of the “Demon Core” accidents are pretty horrible. The photographs of the victims are not something you probably want to see — they are bad. I have described them elsewhere. Suffice to say these were extremely painful deaths, involving a body whose internal cellular processes were breaking down in real time under the influence of billions of tiny cellular cuts, and all the while the poor scientists were being monitored, photographed, and (ultimately) inventoried. Slotin’s hubris and bravado caused his death, but it didn’t mean he deserved that suffering, and it doesn’t mean we can’t feel sorry for him, one human to another. I am not trying to be a scold. We just have to remember that we are not making fun of an abstract idea, here. There was real suffering involved.

And… yet. What is interesting to me about many of the initial memes, especially the anime ones, is that they appear to have originated from Japan. And that adds a wrinkle to the sentiment here.

The “Demon Core” was, as people who know the full story are well-aware, was actually the third plutonium core fabricated, after the one detonated at Trinity and the one detonated over Nagasaki, and would have almost surely been used over a Japanese city had World War II continued for a few more weeks. The plutonium core before it killed some 40,000–70,000 people, mostly Japanese civilians but also Korean laborers and even some Allied Prisoners of War, at Nagasaki. The “Demon Core” killed two American weapons scientists, and at least in Slotin’s case was entirely preventable and due to a lack of proper procedure and respect for the hazards involved.

So perhaps if anybody has a “right” to make jokes in poor taste about the “Demon Core”… it might be the Japanese? Because Americans have made jokes about the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki since they occurred. One can’t just attribute it to wartime sentiment. Well after the suffering of the Japanese victims was public knowledge, and after the Japanese became a key American ally, there were still novelty songs about the killing of cities. Even just a few weeks ago, Saturday Night Live featured a joke in particularly bad taste about the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to atomic bomb survivors. I’m not here to be the humor police, or to say things should be “off limits” for comedy, or that it’s “too soon,” or make any other scolding noises. Dark humor, in its own strange and inverted way, is arguably a sort of coping mechanism — a defense against the darkness, a way to tame and de-fang the horrors of the world. The bomb is no stranger to such treatment, of course — consider Dr. Strangelove, or Tom Lehrer — although my sense is that the “Demon Core” memes are not, in any serious way, making conscious “interventions” in how people think about the risks of the nuclear world.