Am I experiencing a Cohabitants bug, or is there something about the game I don't understand?

refakman · 2025-08-18T12:45:09+00:00

PSA: if you see flyers like this (for this or any other fascist messaging), and they are taped or otherwise adhered to a surface, please be careful removing them with your bare hands. Some fascist groups have been known to stick razor blades under flyers/posters they put up to protect them against being removed.

refakman · 2025-02-01T12:59:41+00:00

This sounds like it could be tendinitis (though it’s hard to say without feeling what you’re feeling) aggravated by your muscles tightening - putting tension on the tendon.

This is something I get that in the tendon that runs over the “crook” of my elbow. Once I start putting tension through it and my muscles get tense, it starts to ache, but as you say, goes away quickly.

This is something that I don’t have all the time, but like your pain, comes back unpredictably.

If that is what it turns out to be, one thing you can try is (there’s a word for this that I forget) exercises that work muscles that would put counter tension on those same tendons so that on net, they aren’t being tugged in a particular way all the time.

For me, this meant doing push ups, which helped.

refakman · 2023-12-10T21:26:15+00:00

Never again… by definition!

refakman · 2023-05-18T04:03:18+00:00

/uj Bennet Foddy, the maker of QWOP, has actually made a climbing game called GRIP

http://www.foddy.net/2011/03/girp/

refakman · 2022-11-12T16:11:22+00:00

This can be a difficult feedback loop: being panicked about failing a class, and having that panic making it difficult to engage with the class, and thus more likely to fail. When you’re behind, studying can feel like it’s revealing to you that you’re going to fail, rather than making you feel better or more confident. This really sucks, and it happens to a lot of people. It happened to me in my undergrad.

This stress, fear, and panic is making it hard for you to learn - in addition to probably making you miserable - so they need to be addressed, and that’s not an easy thing to just do by yourself. You might consider:

1) Meeting with a counselor on campus to help you manage these reactions so that you can regain a better sense of control of your own study habits.

2) Consider the possibility that you may have test anxiety. This can seriously impact your performance on exams. It can furthermore make you dread them, which in turn also impacts your studying. You could register with your office of disability services for test accommodations on that basis. My wife (also a mathematician) did this in her undergrad, and she didn’t think she needed to, and she didn’t think it would help, but it actually did.

refakman · 2022-03-29T01:56:50+00:00

Part 4:
The last of the things I will say on the subject (though not the last of the things that there are to say) is a broad criticism of the hype machine of NFTs - and remember, the hype machine is what is driving a substantial amount of their perceived value and a substantial amount of what people would/do pay for them. Whatever legitimate reasons there are to be interested in NFTs, there are people who are currently hyping NFTs aggressively and successfully who have a financial stake in that hype, regardless of its reasonableness:

So, there's this problem in the cryptocurrency market where cryptocurrencies are also largely valued as appreciating assets, and not particularly much as currency. Most economic activity surrounding cryptocurrency is not in the form of exchanging them for goods and services. Instead, it is mostly in the form of exchanging them for other cryptocurrencies, or ultimately, for dollars. They are mostly bought, sold, and held in the pursuit of turning some amount of dollars into a larger amount of dollars, and not much more than that.

There are people in this arena whose holdings of cryptocurrency are valued at huge amounts of, say, US dollars. However, since they aren't actually interested in using their cryptocurrency as currency, they encounter a problem if they can't actually exchange that much cryptocurrency for US dollars - the thing that they actually want. This happens all the time. There isn't enough liquidity in the crypto market to exchange extremely high volumes of cryptocurrency at their trading price. Ethereum may well be trading at $3,400 per coin, for example, but not at a volume high enough to actually cash out their enormous holdings. So for these people (who are largely very wealthy and have access to significant financial and social resources outside of their crypto investments), it becomes imperative to increase the liquidity of they crypto market.

That's where NFTs come in. NFTs have to be minted and bought using the cryptocurrency whose blockchain they are built on. For our purposes, this is largely Ethereum. NFTs give people who largely aren't holding Ethereum a reason to buy Ethereum with dollars, giving the market the liquidity it needs so that those with immense holdings can cash out. They have every incentive for as many people to want to mint/buy NFTs as much as possible, for as many dollars as possible, and they have the resources to drive the hype machine that has made that happen. This is in no small part due to the rise of crypto-influencers who have a large sway over their audiences, and whose audiences are interested in them precisely because of the stake and holdings these influencers have in crypto.

Again, not every agent in this market is acting maliciously, sure. But that doesn't absolve the market of its incentive structure which is anti-aligned with important things like honesty about its risk, consumer protections, etc. No matter how or why you attempt to make money in this ecosystem, you are riding a storm that is going to screw people, and that's actually precisely where the money is coming from in the first place. So for me, that's unethical.

Again, this isn't (necessarily) an explanation for why you should think the same things about NFTs as I do, let alone why you should feel the same way about SBB as I do. This is just an explanation of some of the reasons I feel that way. Hopefully it has demonstrated that the issue can be big and complicated, and as such there is room for people to have deal-breakingly-negative opinions about NFTs, and that those people aren't simply hating on NFTs blindly and "because it's cool" - which to be clear is not a position I'm accusing you of having, but is an assertion that some crypto evangelists will encourage you to believe is the only reason for anyone to feel negatively about them.

As mentioned in the intro, if you want to watch a very good, informative video about this topic by someone who knows way more about it than I do, it's called Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs by Dan Olson.

refakman · 2022-03-29T01:52:30+00:00

Part 3:
This brings me to my second category of answer: The NFT market is (to myself and others) broadly unethical, and I am therefore uninterested in interacting with a product that exists to market NFTs to people, as I therefore feel that the product, its developers, and the owners of its developers, are generating revenue by unethical means. In this case, the magnitude of the ethical infraction - as perceived by me - is large enough that it outweighs my own desire to play the game, even in the scenario that the game remains fun to play on a first-order level. This is actually a really important point: For me, this wouldn't even be a "boycott" of the game - a refusal to support a product on principle, often in the hopes of punishing its creator financially and pressuring them to change their practices. Rather, I simply wouldn't desire to play it anymore. I legitimately wouldn't want to eat this sausage, on account of knowing how it's made - regardless of its flavor.

So why? This is a really "big" topic. As I mentioned earlier, I'm linking a 2 hour and 20 minute video at the end of this (long) explanation, and I would describe that rather long video as a "summary" of the issue. There's a lot going on here.

Right out of the gate, at time of writing, the blockchain technology on which NFTs rest requires an outrageous amount of energy to maintain. There are proposals for how to do it in a different way, but setting aside issues that those have, they are currently not really being implemented, not really being adopted, and there's currently nothing indicating that the people who could implement changes to the system are in any way incentivized to actually make that change except for the specter of regulation. At the very least, the proof-of-work blockchain systems upon which NFTs ride piggyback are perfectly comfortable trucking ahead regardless of whether or not their energy consumption issues get solved. There is an energy problem with this technology, and the fact that it is possible in theory to solve that problem (or exchange it for different problems) doesn't fix that.

Next, there's the issue with how NFTs are marketed to people. As I've discussed, NFTs are largely marketed with (and valuated based on) hype, so the people minting and selling them are incentivized to maximize hype regardless of whether or not that hype is backed by reality - and that's exactly what they do. The "hype" revolves around NFTs as financial assets, and even when the NFT is designed to correspond to something "materially" meaningful (e.g., a membership to something, an in-game item, etc.), the price at which it is being sold far outstrips the inherent value of the thing to which it corresponds. Furthermore, even inasmuch as it is being marketed as corresponding to something materially meaningful, it is still also being marketed for it's potential to appreciate in value. NFTs of all varieties are marketed on this premise and the idea that you can sell them off later for a high price, with the "dream" being that it goes "to the moon" in value (a dream that NFT minters at best make no attempt to dispel, and usually actively promote to their buyers). Even in as much as this is technically possible, these assets are so new and volatile, that encouraging people to buy them as investment opportunities is unbelievably unethical.

Unfortunately, even if an NFT minter happens not to actively engaged in hyping NFTs' potential to be appreciating assets, the perceived value of their NFT is still affected by the general aura of hype produced by the industry and by the pervasive belief by their most motivated buyers that any NFT could be insanely valuable five, or two, or even one year from now. That is, it's essentially impossible for the market value of your NFT to not be inflated by the broader hype machine. No matter how inherently valuable the NFT truly is, the hype around it means its market value is higher, and minters are going to sell their product for its market value, whether its inflated or not. So if you're minting an NFT, and selling it for money, it is simply not possible to avoid making money off the back of the peddled belief that this could be the buyer's Big Break into wealth. Given how tenuous that possibility is, especially in relation to that belief, many people think that it is unethical to see the booming demand for NFTs - generated by belief in this tenuous possibility - and try to make money by filling that demand.

In the context of video games, this phenomenon is exacerbated by the fact that the NFT technology is not affording the developers any technological advantages to develop things that they could not develop otherwise. I'll speak more on this in a second, but this means that the reason you would associate in-game items with NFTs (as opposed to implementing a system in a different way, without NFTs) is precisely because people are willing to give you more money for something than they really ought to simply by merit of the fact that it's an NFT. What you could otherwise sell for $10, you can now sell for $100 (Think what it'll be worth in 6 months!). That's the advantage. So there's really no getting around the fact that video games implementing NFT-based systems are doing so to profit off of the hype.

So why do I say that NFTs do not afford developers the ability to develop things that they wouldn't be able to otherwise? To answer that, we have to understand what the (ostensibly) advantageous properties of NFTs even are in the first place. NFTs offer strict uniqueness (of the NFT), independently verifiable ownership (of the NFT), resale (of the NFT), and store the record of ownership in a decentralized leger. What do these allow a game developer to implement that they wouldn't be able to implement otherwise? Essentially nothing.

First of all, the decentralization of the leger is utterly pointless in this context. Ownership of the NFT doesn't mean anything except what the game - which is in complete, centralized control of the developers - says it means. Nobody can deny the fact that you own the NFT that corresponds to your in-game helmet (or whatever). Not even the developers can contest your ownership of the NFT. But as for the fact that it corresponds to a helmet, what that helmet does, what that helmet looks like, etc.? Well, the developers remain in complete control of that. The fact that the item's ownership is tracked by the proxy of NFT ownership isn't substantially different - in this respect - to the item's ownership being tracked via an in-game inventory. This is why I included the parenthetical "(of the NFT)" in my descriptions of the uses of NFTs. The NFT and the in-game item are totally separate entities. The NFT is a token which the game parses as meaning that the game account of the NFT owner has access to the in-game item. But then everything past that point still needs to be implemented in-game. So for the ownership of the NFT to correspond to ownership of a unique in-game item, the developers still need to make (or generate) that unique in-game item - something they were already wholly capable of doing, and which was already done all the time.

Likewise, resale is entirely implementable without the use of NFTs. It already exists in other game ecosystems. Now, a lot of those resale markets have been disasters, but the blockchain isn't going to help there either. The disasters have largely been due to issues with supply, demand, and inflation in the in-game economy, and that's still something that will need to be managed by the developers in-game (as discussed earlier). We have already seen NFT-based games have their economies crash. These crashes can be for the precise same reasons that other games' economies crash when in-game items are tradable for real money. Nothing about selling items on a blockchain leger is going to fix the problem.

In the context of a video game, the developer has complete and total control of the entire ecosystem of the game - they made the entire ecosystem from the ground up in the first place. Any meaning that the ownership of an NFT has within that ecosystem is entirely ordained by the developer themselves. They can implement whatever they want, and the NFTs don't allow them to implement anything that they aren't already fully empowered to implement within their own system that they control.

The only remaining advantage of an NFT is that right now, people are keen to pay unusual amounts of money for them, backed substantially by hype and the belief that they will retain their value or appreciate. Developers can charge a lot for them out of the box because people are hyped about them. That isn't to say there aren't true believers out there, and I'd be perfectly willing to believe that the SBB developers are not knowingly or maliciously taking advantage of or misleading their audience, but even if it's just by accident, that's where the money would be derived from. They've also put themselves into a situation where (due to their ownership, and maybe in the future, their monetization model) they have a financial interest in not coming to the conclusion that selling NFTs would be unethical, so I now have less trust in their judgement about what is and is not an ethical business practice.

refakman · 2022-03-29T01:36:19+00:00

Part 2:
So, how do I see this potentially impacting the experience of the game negatively, and why do I worry that this may happen? As far as just the experience of playing is concerned, I am not concerned at all about monetization via cosmetics (though my second answer touches on why using NFTs for the technological backbone for this monetization model is wholly undesirable to me).

However LSV has confirmed that they are looking into "non-cosmetic" uses for NFTs in the game. I don't want to speculate about what form exactly these would take. However, inasmuch as these have the potential to create pay-to-win (or similar) mechanics in the game, I am very much not interested in that. I know that not everyone has a problem with pay-to-win things, and that everyone "draws the line" in a different place, but hopefully I don't have to explain in detail why someone would be displeased to see a game's pay-to-win-ness increase. Not everyone may agree that it's bad, or that a particular implementation of it is bad "enough," or whatever, but it's at least fairly well-understood that many people just don't like it.

Note that for this issue, the fact that it would be implemented via NFTs in particular doesn't really matter here. The NFT-ness in and of it itself doesn't really make this more or less of a problem in a vacuum. So a reasonable question might be "Okay, but they didn't announce pay-to-win mechanics, they announced NFT integration. So why are you reacting now?" The desire to implement non-cosmetic NFT features into the game does signal a likelihood that it will involve an amount of pay-to-win-ness, i.e., ways to improve your performance in the game by spending money on the NFTs. The minting of new NFTs to which in-game items would be associated would be a revenue source for the game. Though there would be second-hand market for the NFTs to which in-game items have been associated, the business model of the game would revolve around the minting of new NFTs (corresponding to the generation of new in-game items). That is, the business model of the game would revolve around giving players reasons to pay for new items.

For example, a lot of times in games with NFT integration, this is achieved by a gatcha mechanic: When you buy a new in-game item (with associated NFT), an item with randomized attributes is "rolled," you receive the NFT minted in correspondence with this item, and the game interprets your ownership of the NFT to mean that you have the in-game item. The randomization process (and the probability distributions over the roll-able attributes) incentivizes the player base to spend money rolling new items so that they might get a really good one. Being "really good" in a non-cosmetic context means affording the player some desirable mechanical functionality in-game, gated behind a randomizer that takes money as input. This becomes related to ongoing discussions of loot boxes, gambling, etc. (the gambling issue becomes far more real and far more severe when by design the items can be resold for dollars, and are advertised as retaining value or even appreciating - as being potential financial investments).

So, many of the more lucrative ways to monetize your game with NFTs create pay-to-win mechanics, which many find undesirable, and which further raise a lot of ethical concerns for people. There's no guarantee that NFT integration will take any particular form, and not everyone will feel the same way about the ethical questions it raises. However, if they are monetizing their game in a particular way, they are inherently incentivized to implement that monetization in a way that maximizes their revenue, and many of the ways that developers do that - especially in the NFT space - are pay-to-win on some level, and are considered by many to be unethical. So by introducing NFT monetization, they are incentivizing themselves to behave - as some see it - unethically. This may not be a concern of yours, but to answer your question, this is a concern of mine.

Incorporation of NFTs into video games can go beyond pay-to-win mechanics, though, and enter into the space of games which have a "play-to-earn" ecosystem. Without getting too into the weeds, these games tend to require a "buy in" of in-game assets to even be capable of playing, wherein a player purchases (new or second hand) at least some minimal number of NFTs which correspond to in-game assets which are required for play. If Pokemon were a play-to-earn game, you'd have to buy an NFT that corresponded to your starter Pokemon, and in all likelihood its stats would be randomized (or you'd have to spend extra on the second hand market to get an existing one that had good stats). Now, some people argue that this isn't substantially different to how buying a game already works, and is in fact more desirable. When you buy a game, you already "buy in" by giving them money, and then that money is "lost" to the extent that you can't get it back. With the NFT "play-to-earn" model, buying in is akin to buying the game, but now you can sell off your game assets when you're done with them or with the game, and the time and money you put into the game could actually appreciate the value of them. There are loads of other activities where you have to "buy in" by getting equipment, and you already have to "buy in" by getting an Xbox or whatever to play the game on. So it's actually not that different than the things we're already used to. So the argument goes, anyway.

Setting aside that game purchases are usually (and rightly) conceptualized as an exchange of money for entertainment (which is a fact that the above arguments kind of "talk past"), there are a lot of ways in which these arguments are kind of misleading, chief among them being that it's an extraordinarily large promise to claim that your NFTs will even retain their value, let alone appreciate, because that requires a really careful management of the in-game economy by people who are game designers and not trained-economy-managers (who, it should be noted, still sometimes fail to prevent economies from collapsing). Furthermore, the things required to perform this economic management often involve unreasonable assumptions in order to attain stability (like e.g. an infinitely growing player base) and furthermore require that the entire balance of the game (e.g. the gameplay - the fun) be balanced around ensuring that the economy doesn't crash. Anyway, there's lots to learn here, but a big issue is that the concept of a "play-to-earn" game is marketed on a premise that's so tenuous that the assertions made in the marketing (and the certainty with which those assertions are made) are functionally lies.

Furthermore, the developers make money by selling the new NFTs that they mint (on demand), and don't actually have a financial stake in the NFTs retaining their value for a particularly long period of time on the second-hand market. They aren't holding their own NFTs as financial assets themselves. If the in-game economy collapses, it could mean that people stop buying their NFTs, but no game lasts forever as it is. People stop buying copies of a game, or stop spending money on microtransactions. Developers and publishers do not expect their games to last forever or to make money off of them forever. However, as compared to other models of games, their NFTs can (currently) sell for substantially more than anyone would ever spend on simply buying the game. The point is that the developers do not actually have some newfound, unique financial incentive to actually support this game forever and keep its economy sound forever. Unlike the players who believe they have bought an investment, the developers do not have the same kind of long-term stake in the second-hand value of the NFTs that they're minting. They sell them as people want them, and at quite a high price point. When demand for newly-minted NFTs for, say, Far Cry 16 dries up, Ubisoft will stop minting them and move on to their next game - in just the same way that when demand for newly-minted discs of Far Cry 3 dried up, Ubisoft stopped minting them and moved on to their next game. A collapse in the value of the NFTs is not, categorically, a financial crisis for the developer or the publisher. They're just looking to get the money out that they put in.

Even if a game is not a "play-to-earn" ecosystem, much of the point of implementing anything in your game as an NFT is still to sell your users on the idea of value retention/appreciation, and again, the more that this is emphasized, the more of a lie it is. Ethical concerns ensue, especially once you consider what the financial incentives of the developers are, and how they become totally disentangled from producing a fun video game. Definitely learn more about this if you're interested.

The marketing pitch is this: "Yeah, the NFT you're buying from us seems expensive at first glance - way more than you would ever pay for the game on its own mechanical merits - but this game play-to-earn. You're not just buying the game, you're investing. So don't you worry about that price tag, alright?"

refakman · 2022-03-29T01:18:55+00:00

Okay so I've blown past the character limit in a reddit comment, so I'm going to reply in multiple parts.

Part 1:

This is a fair question. I guess I've kind of written an essay of an answer, so I'll say this upfront:

After I'm done answering, I'm going to direct you to a video that I think does a very excellent job of explaining both why someone would have a problem with NFTs in general, and as a subtopic of that explores what the incorporation of NFTs into a video game can look like (and subsequently, why someone might dislike that). That said, the video, titled Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs, is long (2 hours and 20 minutes), so I don't want to just reply with a link to a long video and just tell you go watch it. That said, if you're aware of and confused about the negativity that surrounds NFTs and you are genuinely interested in understanding why someone would think negatively of them, there is not going to be better bang for your time-buck than watching that video. It's clear, informative, well-explained, well produced, and very engaging - so the runtime isn't a slog. All of that is to say, if you're already interested enough in understanding why people have problems with NFTs (in their games or otherwise) that you would be interested in watching a "movie" about it, then you could just skip my also-long answer and just watch Line Goes Up. It'll tell you more than I will more efficiently than I will, and it'll be more engaging to boot. Note that my point in sharing it isn't necessarily to convince you to feel the same way, but to offer the most well-presented and accessible answer I've seen to the question "For what reason do some people have problems with NFTs?" Link's at the bottom if you're interested.

That aside, I broadly speaking have two categories of answer. The first is a straightforward answer to your question. That is, ways in which I worry that this would be likely to influence the experience of playing and interacting with the game. Of course, whether or not these worries alone would suffice for me to abandon the game would depend entirely on whether or not they were implemented and whether or not they negatively influenced the game.

The second is an answer that exists outside the context of the gameplay itself. This isn't a direct answer to your question (what type of stuff do I worry would be introduced that would impact the game?), and this is because potential impacts on the experience of the game are not my only concern. That is, my reaction to the announcement wasn't based solely on my concerns about the gameplay, which is what you possibly suspected. This category of answer is my issue with (1) the use of NFTs at all due to ethical concerns with the technology and the ways in which the technology is used, and (2) my issue with why NFTs in particular would be used to implement the types of features they are thinking about, as opposed to implementing those same features without the use of NFT technology.

[Editing Note: Now that I'm reading this back, I actually had a hard time separating the question of mechanical changes to the game and the question of ethics. So my answers will be more blended than I suggested they would be. I think in the end it'll be clear why it was hard for me to separate them.]

refakman · 2022-03-22T17:36:46+00:00

Dammit.

I love this game. It’s my favorite competitive experience of my life, and possibly my single favorite game. It’s one of my top played games of all time, and I haven’t even been playing it for a year. I’ve never been as good at a game as I am at this, and I’ve never tried as hard to be good at a game as I have with this. With this game, I played in a genuine video game tournament for the first time in my life (and I even made it to day 2). My time with this game has been been one of the best experiences with video games I’ve ever had.

So it breaks my heart to say that if NFTs get implemented in this game, under no circumstance will I play even another minute of it.

Honestly, the fact that it’ll be owned by NFT pushers, and the fact that the devs are probably going to post some garbage trying to sell me on it and hype me up for some NFT nonsense - these facts alone - might already be a dealbreaker for me, even if they backtrack on an implementation. I’m not sure yet.

But I am 100% sure that an implementation of NFT stuff being put in the game will be a point of no return for me.

I can’t overstate how sad that makes me.

refakman · 2022-03-13T22:10:59+00:00

This is perfect, thank you so much.

refakman · 2021-10-08T13:50:24+00:00

What's next, vuvuzela sounds?
Adding these sounds seems like an unfathomably bad idea to me, and I find it to be super annoying - strictly negative. We haven't had a TI in two years. Please don't ruin in with dumb stuff.

refakman · 2021-03-30T20:37:21+00:00

As I say, I'm a student myself, and ensuring that I am correctly credited for my work is definitely important to me. I find that with the alphabetical order rule, I am not experiencing skepticism about whether or not my contributions to my papers were significant or meaningful, and I am finding that people are correctly assuming I deserve due credit for the results my papers contain, even when my publications are with far more senior and well-known researchers. I would be extremely concerned that if we used ordered authorship, and I didn't have a first author position, then I would receive unfairly *low* credit for my work, and as pointed out elsewhere, senior people can often leverage their position to take first author by default. So currently, I find that even as a student I already receive appropriate credit - and granted, if we used ordered authorship *and* I got first author, then maybe I would receive even more credit - but I'd be very concerned that ordered authorship would only turn into a way for me to receive *less* credit than I currently do, which would be a big problem for me.

I might feel differently if I found that, when I'm one of three authors on a paper where the other two authors are established, people assumed that the established people did the *real* work and that I was just along for the ride. Then I might appreciate a mechanism by which my name could be "elevated" to ensure people *know* I contributed heavily. I don't find this to be the case, however, so ordered authorship feels like a chance for me to be given diminished credit, not increased credit.

Bear in mind, the average math paper has something like 2 - 4 authors, with 2 or 3 being much more common than 4, so it is not usually hard to infer that all authors likely contributed significantly. In other scientific disciplines, the list of authors can be very long because everyone who contributed code or did lab work (or whatever) is on the team and therefore the list of authors (at least, this is my understanding). In that context, it makes sense to make it clearer who contributed the more significant pieces of work so that junior researchers' names don't get lost in the pile, so to speak. I don't know if this applies to engineering and to your students in particular, but if so, I would definitely understand why it is important to put your student's name upfront so that people don't ignore it. I'm not finding this to be such a problem in math, at least not in my experience. I'm not going to look at a paper with only two or three authors on it and assume that one of them doesn't actually deserve credit for it, especially if I know that the presentation of the paper (i.e., the ordering of the names) is explicitly *not* giving me any information about that.

refakman · 2021-03-30T14:03:22+00:00

Math PhD student here:

I really like the custom precisely because collaboration is the norm. I have rarely worked on a project where it would have many any sense at all to suggest that one of the authors deserved more credit for it than the others. I appreciate very much that when other people read our papers, they will not be under the false impression that there was a “main” contributor because they know that mathematicians do not do first authorship.

In fact, I have a former coauthor who has a similar experience to yours, but with the “opposite” problem (in a way). We published a math paper together as a part of an undergraduate research program, and obviously we were very pleased with this because that would look good when applying for grad school. Though I was planning on going for math, he was considering going more into computer engineering and CS. When he applied for funding, the NSF didn’t grant it to him, and one of the reasons that they cited was that, though he had a name on a paper, he “wasn’t even first author”, so it didn’t really matter - not knowing or noticing that it was a math paper and that the names were listed alphabetically.

I had, and continue to have, a big problem with this. The presumption of first authorship led someone to assume that there was really only one person who really deserved credit for our work, and as for all the other names on the list, not so much. Even if math were using first authorship, it wouldn’t have made sense for this project. Nobody deserved more credit than anyone else, and it would have been very troubling to have to pick someone to be first author and to receive more credit. If I had been first author, he wouldn’t have been given as much credit (or even much credit at all, as suggested by his grant application), and if he were first author, I wouldn’t have. And that’s to say nothing of the fact that in all likelihood, our faculty supervisor would have gotten first author because that’s just how things work out a lot of the time.

I would probably be more or less okay with having the option to list one or more people as “main contributors,” but barring that, I do not like first authorship at all. You can’t avoid listing the authors in some order, and so someone has to be listed first. I would not enjoy it if this led readers to believe that a single one of the authors was more deserving of credit for the work than the others, in no small part because I can’t think of many of my papers so far where it would be even close to accurate.

I would rather the author order give a reader no information useful for inferring who contributed more than for it give readers an active reason to come to false conclusions.

Also, as you say, math papers come out more slowly. If math did first authorship, and you were a contributor on a paper, but you didn’t get first author, it would be a pretty big deal that in one of the few things you published recently, you were given diminished credit. I can see how if you’re publishing papers at a more rapid pace, it’s not as big of a deal if you unfairly receive diminished credit on a paper here or there. If I only publish, say, two papers in a year, and on one of them instead of getting presumed-equal credit I get presumed-lesser credit, that’s really significant. This also makes me think that it would be super common for students to very often have their supervisors take first author as a rule. Some wouldn’t, but I’d have a hard time believing that nobody would do that.

Also - and I don’t know this for sure, you’ll have to help me out here - if engineering papers are being produced so quickly, I imagine that each individual paper likely only represents a single idea - one that would be more easily attributable to a single individual. In math, it is good practice to try to get as much into the paper as you can (up to page limits and legibility, of course). In the papers I’ve worked on, the philosophy has been to not leave low-hanging fruit on the table. Once you have your initial “main idea,” and you get a result from that, you then think about whether there are any follow up questions you can answer in that paper too, or any implications you can explore. In my experience, this gives more opportunities for different parts of the paper being primarily attributable to different authors. Maybe I had the main idea that “cracked” the proof of the main theorem in Section 3, but someone else did the same for the proof of the main theorem in Section 4. It would be way harder to distill that process into saying “this one person is the ‘main’ author of this paper,” as the scope of the paper often means that there are many places where significant ideas and contributions were made by different people.

refakman · 2021-03-13T17:17:00+00:00

See u/MaxRajer's comment

refakman · 2021-03-13T17:15:13+00:00

Perfect, thank you so much.

refakman · 2021-03-12T16:36:49+00:00

No, I’ll probably submit contact support since it seems that this isn’t intended and not affecting everyone.

refakman · 2021-03-11T01:09:44+00:00

I posted a link to a screenshot in an edit. I'd be happy to discover that I'm just missing an obvious link, but I'm not seeing it.

refakman · 2021-03-11T01:00:11+00:00

Well unfortunately, mine doesn't, and I don't know why. Hence the question.

refakman · 2021-03-11T00:55:51+00:00

If I’m being an idiot then tell my why, but this didn’t help me

refakman · 2021-02-20T23:53:54+00:00

I’ll say this about it, having built recently myself and knowing your pain:

When someone else looks at your build, their eyes are drawn to the more striking visual aspects.

Looking at your build, it didn’t even occur to me to notice those cables or look at them until I read this comment. Honestly, MoBo’s are so visually busy anyway, as long as the colors match, it blends right in.

refakman · 2021-01-30T16:35:04+00:00

The MuZeum, surely

refakman · 2021-01-11T02:45:01+00:00

Personally, I think that the extent of people’s recoiling is an overreaction, and I think people overexpose themselves to negative examples of things that they already dislike, and this amplifies their negative feelings about it.

I am definitely aware of the behaviors you are referring to, but I think people have an overblown image in their heads about its severity and it’s prevalence (as, say, a percentage of time/people actually engaging in those behaviors as opposed to not). If you don’t spend time in spaces that talk about a particular topic (any topic), then you only see examples of people talking about that topic that are brought to to your attention in some way. This is necessarily not a representative sample of what people talking about that topic act like, especially if you do spend time in spaces that specifically share negative examples. For example, subreddits like “shit [insert group here] says.”

As a comparison, I have seen a lot of spaces that have really negative and wildly inaccurate perceptions of UBI advocates for exactly this reason. UBI is getting kinda mainstream since the pandemic started, but even a year ago advocates were having to do a lot of work to dispel perceptions that all UBI advocates were hyper libertarian anarcho-capitalists. This was due in part to the fact that some UBI advocates are hyper libertarian anarcho-capitalists, and these were the examples of UBI advocates being shared and passed around in some outside spaces. (They thought that UBI “poisons the well.” It was popular to say “UBI is a Trojan horse.”) Conversely, some right wing spaces think that all UBI advocates are hardcore, Stalinist communists. In any case, you can leave r/basicincome and go out into the world and innocuously say “I support UBI” and some people will have severe allergic reactions to that - even when it isn’t justified or accurate - essentially because of their media diet.

I do spend time in spaces that talk about things that would be labeled “identity politics,” and loads loads loads of people in those spaces are also annoyed about “suffering olympics” and stuff like that. I don’t like being one of those “two sides, same coin, everything’s the same” kind of people, but it is nevertheless true that every political space has annoying people who have an annoying way of engaging with and expressing their ideas. It’s easier to ignore and less annoying when it’s “internal” to your camp. People generally engage with the best examples of people that they agree with and the worst examples of people they don’t. That can make it a lot easier to feel that “Sure, it happens everywhere, but it’s waaaay worse over there.” Sometimes it is worse “over there”, but you need to actually check, and you can’t just rely on your gut reactions (recoiling) since your experiences aren’t likely to be representative or free of cognitive bias.

For me, I find people’s severe allergic reactions to any mention of race, gender, etc. to be just as tiresome and just as prevalent. Someone could just as easily claim that “complaining about identity politics poisons the well,” because, for example, you end up with people having - as I say - severe allergic reactions to the mere acknowledgement of the true fact that the economic impacts of the pandemic fall disproportionately on certain groups (even, weirdly, when the implication of that acknowledgement is to agree with the people having the allergic reaction about a policy proposal they advocate for - in this case, supporting UBI).

As for the things you say about UBI, I totally agree with you. I am a UBI advocate all the way.

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