# On the blindness of blind reviews DevFeed: [On the blindness of blind reviews]() Original publisher: [Read original article]() Author: Lea Verou Published: 2015-08-13T00:00:00Z Content type: opinion Language: en Sources: [Lea Verou's blog]() Topics: [Process]() Tags: [blog](), [conference](), [rants](), [thoughts]() ## AI overview The article argues that blind review is a flawed way to select talks for industry conferences. Compared with academic reviews, industry conference committees have less information and must assess content, speaker skill, and talk quality, which can produce conservative and uncertain selections. ## Source excerpt Over the last couple of years, blind reviews have been popularized as the ultimate method for fair talk selection in industry conferences. While I don't really submit proposals myself, I have served several times on the other side of the process, doing speaker selection in conference committees, and the more data points I collect, the more convinced I become that the blind selection process is fundamentally flawed. Blind reviews come from the world of academia. However, in academic conferences, you do not judge a talk by a 1-2 paragraph abstract, but by a 10+ page paper, so there's way more to judge by. In addition, in academia the content of the research matters infinitely more than the quality of a talk. In industry conferences, selection committees in blind reviews have both way less data to use, and a much harder task, as they need to balance several factors (content, speaker skill, talk quality etc). It's no surprise that the results end up being even more of a gamble. Blind reviews result in conservative talk selection. More often than not, I remember me and my fellow committee members saying "Damn, this talk could be great with the right presenter, but that's rare" and giving it a poor or average score. Few topics can make good talks regardless of the presenters. Therefore, when there is little information on the speaker in the initial selection round, talk selection ends up being conservative, rejecting more challenging topics that need a skilled speaker to shine and sticking to safer choices. One of my most successful talks ever was "The humble border-radius" which was shortlisted for a .net award for Conference Talk of The Year 2014. It would never have passed any blind review. There is no committee in their right mind that would have accepted a 45 minute talk about ...border-radius. The conferences I presented it at invited me as a speaker, carte blanche, and trusted me to present on whatever I felt like. Judging by the reviews, they were not disappointed.