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I think this is a natural outcome of the peer review process; you're not targeting research papers at statistical models, you're targeting them at human reviewers. This kind of behavior is equally prevalent in many fields, including computer science. I recently reviewed a paper from a research team in China, on a scalable and ubiquitous ad hoc sensing platform. The presented "spin" was that it could potentially be useful for monitoring power distribution networks, thereby reducing blackouts, which was certainly true. However, it could also have been used for an inescapable, totalitarian panopticon (this part was implicit and unstated). As a reviewer with explicit instructions to evaluate the ethical implications of the work, is it my responsibility (A) to interpret the stated "spin", (B) extract and evaluate strictly the technical contributions of the work, or (C) all of the above, and the implicit "anti-spin" interpretation that was provided courtesy of my Western worldview? And here's a twist - six months previously, a similar situation occurred with my own work, in which a technology that I envisioned (spun) being used for disaster relief caught the eye of an alphabet agency for low-cost, secure data collection in third world theaters. This was deeply shocking to me at the time, because I hadn't considered this potential use case when I was developing the system. I had spun its impact so effectively in my own mind, I didn't even see the negative alternative. It's my observation that human brains will inject their own spin if it doesn't already exist, using the social and cultural norms to which that brain is accustomed. I don't hold a researcher's desire to sell their work as effectively as possible against them, especially if the person to whom they're selling most effectively is themselves. |