This piece is part of Outward, Slate's home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. I've had a lot of dick in my DMs. Lopsided dicks caught pallid in the camera's harsh flash. Let me tell you: The onslaught has been relentless. I have had the full variety of male organ paraded before me.

This year's Stanford HAI virtual fall conference took place on 9-10 November. It comprised a discussion of four policy proposals that respond to the issues and opportunities created by artificial intelligence. The premise is that each policy proposal poses a challenge to the status quo. These proposals were presented to panels of experts who debated the merits and issues surrounding each policy. The event was recorded and you can watch both days' sessions on YouTube.

Peer review forms the backbone of modern scientific manuscript evaluation. But after two hundred and eighty-nine years of egalitarian service to the scientific community, does this protocol remain fit for purpose in 2020? In this work, we answer this question in the negative (strong reject, high confidence) and propose instead State-Of-the-Art Review (SOAR), a neoteric reviewing pipeline that serves as a "plug-and-play" replacement for peer review. At the heart of our approach is an interpretation of the review process as a multi-objective, massively distributed and extremely-high-latency optimisation, which we scalarise and solve efficiently for PAC and CMT-optimal solutions. We make the following contributions: (1) We propose a highly scalable, fully automatic methodology for review, drawing inspiration from best-practices from premier computer vision and machine learning conferences; (2) We explore several instantiations of our approach and demonstrate that SOAR can be used to both review prints and pre-review pre-prints; (3) We wander listlessly in vain search of catharsis from our latest rounds of savage CVPR rejections 1 . If a decision tree in a forest makes marginal improvements, and no one is around to publish it, is it really "state-of-the-art"?