Over the past 10 years, I have submitted very few papers to journals. Every once in a while I submit just to test if the peer review system is still as broken as I remember. From earlier this week. I submitted an article on an application of probability in betting. I know for a fact this is actually a useful application that is used in the real world. Which is also why I knew it would be rejected almost immediately -- because why would a real world application be of interest to an academic journal on applied probability? As expected, it was rejected from the Annals of Applied Probability because "there is no new mathematics". A lot of fields, and especially probability, have long had "math envy", so they distort the direction of the field to look more mathematical. (See analytic philosophy for the best example.) I wonder if this attitude will change now that doing hard math has become commoditized.