Letter to a European Research Council referee

Dear motherfuc referee,

Thanks very much for your insightful comments. Below I discuss some of your deep observations.

Ground-breaking nature and potential impact of the research project: 
Multidisciplinary proposal. The physics part is rather weak in terms of possible achievements and originality.

I see that you managed to summarize your opinion about my five-page project synopsis in just one line. You must be exhausted. Other referees would have copied one or two sentences from the abstract just to give the impression that they actually read the proposal. But you’re right: why pretend? Actually, why did you bother writing anything at all? Next time, send a disgusted emoticon, “unfollow” my proposal, or just type: “GRAAAAAHHH!” in order to express your “pondered opinion” about my work.

The I-spit-on-your-ERC-proposal emoticon, soon in 90% of all ERC evaluation reports.

Yes, my friend, mine is a multidisciplinary proposal. The goal is to develop a computational framework to reason about infinity in quantum mechanics. I’m sure that every day you evaluate hundreds (or millions!) of proposals just like mine, and that’s why you didn’t regard it as original as, say, entanglement detection or quantum simulations with an ion trap. It is certainly not as original as texting an ERC referee report from your iPhone while driving over postdocs in the park, as you plainly do during working hours.

You write that"the physics part is rather weak in terms of possible achievements". I see. For you, demonstrating experimentally that the world is infinite-dimensional is a weak achievement. Let me ask you: what qualifies as a strong achievement? Building a time machine? Attaining immortality? Typing a ten-line report with your penis?

Principal Investigator
To what extent has the PI demonstrated the ability to propose and conduct groundbreaking research? Very good.
To what extent does the PI provide evidence of creative independent thinking? Very good.
To what extent have the achievements of the PI typically gone beyond the state of the art? Very good.
 
Comments (Optional for reviewers)
Average past performance and impact.

According to the applicant's guide, “very good” is just one grade above being declared “not competent”. Geez, pal, thanks a lot for not recommending the ERC to lock me in a mental institution!

I find your scores very surprising, though, because I would have thought that my work on the characterization of quantum correlations was groundbreaking at the t... but, oh, my God! I forgot that Toni Acín, my PhD advisor, also signed that paper!!! It is obvious that Toni proposed the project, conducted the research and wrote the paper single-handedly; then he put me as first author because I sodomized him brought him coffee. So you’re right, that paper doesn’t prove anything.

How about the rest of the achievements that I summarized in the Achievements section* of my CV? There you can find many instances of creative, independent work, and… ah, you didn’t read it.

My fault: I should have placed a picture of a crucified postdoc in order to get your attention. Besides, if my achievements were so advanced, surely one of them would have acquired self-consciousness, escaped from the CV and tried to contact you. Nothing like that happened, unless at that precise moment you were too busy sculpting jars with postdoc skulls, so that you can drink their blood and live forever.

*Judging from the referee reports, the Achievements Section is a goblin-like mythological creature that lives at the end of my CV and no ERC referee can see.

You might think that I’m being a bit harsh on you, my dear referee. But you must understand. Right after screwing someone’s scientific career with pearls like: “average past performance and impact”, you should at least have the decency to discuss the applicant’s past achievements and argue why they are “average”. Could it be, my dear referee, that you just went through my publications, saw that they didn't have many citations and concluded that my work was “average”?

Then answer this, you vile amoeba! How many citations did John Bell's 1964 paper have for the first ten years? How many citations did Werner’s paper on local entangled states gather between 1989 and 1995? How many citations did the BB84 paper have in 1993? Do you, in your stupid, simplified and self-complacent view of the world, believe that all these papers were lame until year 2000, when they –all of a sudden- became breakthroughs?

“Oh!”, you could say (though in your case I bet it’d sound more like: “HEEHAW!”), “but nowadays quantum information is a well established field! What is your excuse to get so few references?”.

It is ridiculous to put all QI scientists in the same lot: if you don’t know this, you shouldn’t be a referee for the ERC. QI has different subfields, and average citation numbers vary widely between them. Foundations-related research does not get many citations because the community is small and fragmented. It’s not like in quantum computer science, where every year the whole community works on essentially five different problems and any progress whatsoever gets highly cited.

“But even in nonlocality some people get a lot of citations. Why can’t you be like them?”

As you perfectly know, nowadays papers are rarely cited to acknowledge inspiration or to invoke mathematical results: they mainly get referenced at the introduction of other papers, whose authors want to convince journal editors that “our topic is very interesting, because all these other people have worked on vaguely related stuff”. So, in order to be cited at an intro, your result must fit perfectly in a well-established paradigm and be twitter-like, that is, summarizable in a few words which, if possible, should rhyme and make a catchy tune (e.g.: “nana nana nana nanaaa... discord!”). Everything else, like novel topics or deep results, is excluded.

For most of my career, I’ve been trying to conduct original research. Now I’m paying the price. Shall I get specific? I love this paper, but, for my life, I cannot imagine anyone citing it in a near future. My paper on the characterization of quantum nonlocality (which, I admit, is not extremely original) hardly had any citations three years after its publication. And my 2009 paper on macroscopic locality started getting citations last year. Why? Because people (finally!) started citing it at intros along with the information causality paper.

“Wait a moment. Not all original works take time to find recognition. Special relativity was successful from the very beginning!”

Exactly: special relativity was not original, even Einstein admitted it. This may surprise you, after how much this word has been devaluated by funding agencies, but not all important discoveries need be original. Think of the finite quantum de Finetti theorem, or the non-additivity of the classical capacity! Do you want more examples? Antiretroviral therapy, global warming, the standard model of particle physics.

Conclusion (this is for you, rats; the referee must have stopped reading a while ago)

ERC is very much like any other grant: it is targeted to individuals with a strong citation record that hints extreme popularity, and to projects which, no matter the outcome, contribute to enhance the candidate’s publication statistics.

Contrarily to institutional propaganda, ERC is not targeted to independent, creative scientists with high risk/high gain, original projects. Even to the average EU bureau-cretin it must be evident that you cannot estimate independence and creativity if you refuse to read the abstract of a single paper of the applicant. As for proposal reviewing, having referees like the android above evaluating originality is like having Alanis Morissette evaluating irony. So let's throw them all to a volcano and start the selection process again: this time we'll ask them to write a poem before trusting their views on whatever the hell they believe creativity is.

Let me finish with this prophecy: ERC-funded theoretical projects will never be high-risk. Why? Because, like with any other grant, you’re expected to specify… -gasp- … every single step … aargh…  of your research program… aarrrghh … in the BLOODY 5-PAGE SYNOPSIIIIIIIIIIIS!! AAAARRRRGHHHH!!! HULK VERY ANGRY!! WICKED ROBO-REFEREE HURT HULK!!! HULK SMASH AND BASH!!! GRRROOOAAAARRRR!!!

Epilogue

When I was a teenage-mutant-ninja-rat, my literature teacher surprised us one morning by announcing an advertising contest. The students had to pretend that they lived in the 17th century and design a poster announcing the second part of Don Quixote. The most original and creative posters would be exhibited!!

My classmates and I were puzzled: the teacher was a control freak, and giving us artistic freedom was completely out of character. Nevertheless, I gave it my best shot: I wrote a humorous pamphlet about Cervantes’ second part of Quixote parodying a “Hello!” magazine front cover.

Not only I didn’t win the contest, but got severely reprimanded by my teacher. She wrote over my poster: “WHAT THE HELL IS THIS?” and gave me a bad mark.

Later that day, a classmate asked why I looked so grumpy.

I said: “I spent a whole evening coming up with ingenious ideas for that homework, and the teacher doesn’t even think it’s original!”.

My friend smiled. “Miguel”, she said, “have a look at the winning posters”.

I did. The posters were exhibited in the class’ announcing board. There they were: the six of them in all their glory.

One showed a picture of Don Quixote, trotting away on his horse. The poster read: “Reject imitations! Buy yourself a copy of the actual second part of Don Quixote!”. The author of the poster was making reference to Fernández de Avellaneda’s apocryphal sequel of the adventures of Don Quixote.

Now, I don’t need to describe you the rest of the winning posters.

Because the other five said exactly the same.

Yours faithfully,

Schroedinger’s rat