[TYPES] Two-tier reviewing process

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

I've been enjoying the POPL reviewing debate, although not contributing
much because I thought I'd used up my bandwidth allocation on my two
posts. But Mike raises a new question here, about review quality.

| I find the lack of discussion on the integrity/quality of the review
| process a bit surprising, and unfortunate.  My sense was that the
| agreement to relax current standards for paper acceptance is based
| somewhat on a resignation that reviewing, whatever the process, is
| destined to be flawed.

In my original post I argued, to the contrary, that our current review
process represents excellent value to authors, and is a very effective
use of reviewers time.  Poor judgements are sometimes made, and I'm all
for discussing ways to improve that, *provided* they do not do so by
assuming more reviewing effort.  Finding ways to eliminate rejected
papers early, to focus more reviewing effort on better papers -- fine!

| process, to be more fair and effective.  Simon's amended proposal for
| accepting more papers starts by saying we should have a "quality bar"
| but does not suggest how to set this bar, and then assumes that
| whatever the method, more papers would be/should be accepted.

Setting the quality bar is hard, and is bound to be a judgement call.

My main point is that I think the bar is too high at the moment. If that
is true, then the problem *cannot* be solved by refining the reviewing 
process, no matter how well. 

Simon