[godelski]

> If you can't write a meaningful 10-page version of a 30-page paper, you probably can't give a meaningful 25-minute talk on it either.

I can't really tell what's going on here anymore but I don't think we're having a conversation. You're just describing something that's not in good faith here. You're letting "meaningful" do the heavy lifting here. Yes, of course everyone can distill a paper, but not every paper can be distilled and then accepted into publication. Frankly, because reviewers act like exactly this and place weird arbitrary bars on what it means to be good work forgetting that all works are incomplete and thus encouraging embellishing and lying and setting continually new absurd bars.

Stop doing gymnastics to protect a system or just respond to my actual critiques. There's no perfect system so you can even say my critiques are valid yet not enough of a concern to abandon or modify our current system. It's not an all or nothing situation here. But I don't need to be lectured on something this silly as "if you can't do it in 10 pages, you aren't doing it right." My claim was that there isn't a one size fits all standard. I stand buy that. You can respond to what I wrote but there's not a good "teaching moment" here.

If you just want to tell me how I'm wrong without listening to my actual concern then don't comment. You're creating noise and just an angrier internet. If you think I have failed to consider something and that thing is important, do lay it out. But communicate what that actually is rather than just saying "dumb." Give a real critique. The same goes for when you review. Don't be reviewer 2. Reviewer 2 just holds back science.

[jltsiren]

My point was that if a paper needs 30 pages, don't submit it to a conference. That makes as little sense as submitting an algorithms paper to a zoology journal. Conferences are centered around talks, and you can't present a long paper adequately in a short talk.

Journals can be more flexible than conferences. They don't need page limits, because they don't have the physical constraints imposed by conference dates and the number of parallel tracks. But journals also have audiences, and audience expectations are more important than your paper. You should take those expectations into account when choosing the journal. Don't send an algorithms paper to a zoology journal, and don't send a long paper to a journal that focuses on short papers.

Write the paper first, and then choose a journal or a conference that publishes papers like that. Just as there is no single page limit that fits all papers, there is no single venue that publishes papers of all lengths.