I have been struggling the last few days over a paper. The problem is that the original (rejected) paper was 10 pages, describing 1 experiment. For this second submission attempt I had to both include a second experiment and squish the paper down to 8 pages. Not easy, it turns out, but possible. And the fact that it is possible disturbs me a little. Was half of that original paper really irrelevant? So many words, so much expended effort, which after further thought turned out to be totally unnecessary.

My life’s relevancy ratio in general isn’t all that good. If you add up all the time I spend watching TV, sleeping, and dreaming about becoming an astronaut, you are left with maybe 2% of my time being actually productive, in the sense that it will advance humanity in some form. But now, after discovering how much of that stuff is fluff, I feel I have to now downgrade that score to 1%. That is a full 50% drop in estimated total relevant output.

And if the paper gets rejected the score is zero.