Three days ago, I went through a traditional rite of passage for junior academics: I received my first rejection letter on a paper submitted for peer review. After I received the rejection letter, I forwarded the paper to two top professors in my field, who both confirmed that the basic arguments seem to be correct and important. Several top faculty members have told me they believe the paper will eventually be published in a top journal, so I am actually feeling more confident about the paper than before it got rejected.

I am also very frustrated with the peer review system. The reviewers found some minor errors, and some of their other comments were helpful in the sense that they reveal which parts of the paper are most likely to be misunderstood. However, on the whole, the comments do not change my belief in the soundness of the idea, and in my view they mostly show that the reviewers simply didn’t understand what I was saying.

One comment does stand out, and I’ve spent a lot of energy today thinking about its implications: Reviewer 3 points out that my language is “too casual”. I would have had no problem accepting criticism that my language is ambiguous, imprecise, overly complicated, grammatically wrong or idiomatically weird. But too casual? What does that even mean? I have trouble interpreting the sentence to mean anything other than an allegation that I fail at a signaling game where the objective is to demonstrate impressiveness by using an artificially dense and obfuscating academic language.

From my point of view, “understanding” something <i>means</i> that you are able to explain it in a casual language. When I write a paper, my only objective is to allow the reader to understand what my conclusions are and how I reached them. My choice of language is optimized only for those objectives, and I fail to understand how it is even possible for it to be “too casual”.

Today, I feel very pessimistic about the state of academia and the institution of peer review. I feel stronger allegiance to the rationality movement than ever, as my ideological allies in what seems like a struggle about what it means to do science. I believe it was Tyler Cowen or Alex Tabarrok who pointed out that the true inheritors of intellectuals like Adam Smith are not people publishing in academic journals, but bloggers who write in a causal language. I can’t find the quote but today it rings more true than ever.

I understand that I am interpreting the reviewers choice of words in a way that is strongly influenced both by my disappointment in being rejected, and by my pre-existing frustration with the state of academia and peer review. I would very much appreciate if anybody could steelman the sentence “the writing is too casual”, or otherwise help me reach a less biased understanding of what just happened.

The paper is available at https://rebootingepidemiology.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/effect-measure-paper-0317162.pdf . I am willing to send a link to the reviewers’ comments by private message to anybody who is interested in seeing it.