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I am also curious.

What is a reviewer blacklist?

On OpenReview at least, you can enter persons who you are somehow connected with (this is a kind of blacklist). Furthermore, Openreview automatically avoids that your coauthors or persons with the same email domain (e.g. *@google.com) are assigned as reviewers. Openreview is actually pretty smart, but I don't know if authors actively try to trick it out...

I assume they mean that each paper gets a list of reviewers it cannot be assigned to, because of conflicts of interests. But the original question could also be about a general blacklist of reviewers that showed misconduct before (e.g. not reacting to the author rebuttal, etc). I don't think a general blacklist exists... But it might be that the conference organizers indeed have this.

I was assigned a paper to review for Neurips that (unbeknownst to me at the time) came from my institution, and I did my part in declaring my COIs.

Ok, do you have an idea why it failed??

Pretty sure that these conferences would avoid using the word blacklist lol

No clue

Why

Associating the color black with something negative

Blacklist has been used long before ML even existed. It is not a new word and makes sense. Not everything has to be American focused.

Plenty of colors are associated with negative things, including white, red, yellow, green, blue

You could make your question more precise

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I'm, not a boomer, just not an American so I don't subscribe to the American way of thinking.

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Good question

Yes, but not many of those colors are the skin color of a discriminated miniority subjected to systematic abuse and violence for centuries, mostly justified by having that skin color. If you want to understand the argument, you can't ignore social and cultural context.

Most ML conferences are American, happen to have an extensive code of conduct and diversity, inclusion, and accessibility goals, and thus happen in a very American cultural space.

If you want to be part of a community, you can't unsubscribe from rules and be rude as you like by simply saying that you're not American. You're not to discriminate members of the community or use micro-aggressions against members because your culture doesn't acknowledge the societal issues in other countries.

whilst some conferences are American yes, not all are so thinking that one viewpoint is acceptable is wrong and should not be forced down others' throats.

Blacklist is a universal term and is not offensive and trying to say so is stupid so changing the language to appease a small minority of people is stupid. ML and most computer-based software are binary based so changing languages for the sake of it is stupid anyway.

> whilst some conferences are American yes, not all are

The ones OP mentions (ICML / ICLR / NeurIPS) are though.

> Blacklist is a universal term and is not offensive and trying to say so is stupid so changing the language to appease a small minority of people is stupid

There's enoguh science to back up that this is probably not stupid:

> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6007773/
but of course, if you don't care about a minority because they're a minority, you can go ahead and do whatever you want to do. You just might be an inconsiderate asshat then.

of course, it matters to the individual and for the individual to concern themselves with.

The concept of science is the detail within, not the language used as long as the result is shown to be what is proven/unproven.

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