> On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in the story. Right, if it's a Chekhov's Gun (or even a Brick Joke), then that's different. I was w

> On the other hand, I presumed we'd get back to that later in the story. Right, if it's a Chekhov's Gun (or even a Brick Joke), then that's different. I was wondering if it would turn out to be another AI that was trained on other PRs too or something, but it didn't seem to actually pan out. It just seems unnecessary to make "Chinese reviewer has bad English" as the third sentence in the whole thing. There's hardly any character development for the researcher (basically this comment, going drinking, calling the the regulations alarmism and having a husband are the only times he's really mentioned outside of his actual research), so it doesn't seem particularly salient. Certainly, I'm not calling Gwern racist, just that if you're going to make "racist asshole" (or anything, indeed) an important part of a character, it needs more than a throwaway, otherwise you risk that instead of making that a feature of the character, it just feels like part of the cultural background. The laziness and drinking, for example, is clearly defined with a return to it to delineate the extent of it, and it's important to the plot. On the other hand, him having a husband is a throwaway, which simply indicates that being gay is so unremarkable that no further comment is needed (quite rightly).