The vision community needs to establish standards for reporting ocular aberrations for several reasons.

1. New technology has caused explosive growth in visual optics research over the last 5 years which has attracted lots of very bright researchers with lots of exciting new ideas, which is a great combination for making progress. The down-side of rapid growth, however, is that it can be chaotic and inefficient.

2. In particular, the number of new people getting into visual optics research who do not have formal training in optics, and clinicians with only minimal training in optics, leads to what I call the "Neophyte syndrome" in which the combination of optical naivety plus unbridled excitement at having wonderful new technology to play with leads to confusion, mistakes, and misunderstandings.

3. Lastly, we all suffer from work-avoidance syndrome, and rightly so - nobody wants to re-invent the optical wheel. Not everyone in our field is a neophyte. There is a great deal of genuine expertise in optical theory, design, and measurement in our community. If we can capture that experitse and use it to help define standards for our field, the reward will be a dramatic improvement in our ability to communicate with each other.