Play your cards right
Northern Hemisphere readers are facing many more weeks of long, dark nights and cold weather, so what better than a fun card game? If you’re too big a poker bankroll and you’ve exhausted your comic book potential Cards Against Humanity (a state usually reached after about 10 minutes of playing), and if you’re interested in scientific research, you should consider it Publish or die.
Created by social psychologists Max Hui Yes, Publish or die simulates the experience of building a career in scientific research. The game is about posting as many papers as possible and collecting citations, even if your papers are rubbish or you have to sabotage other players’ posts. Or as Bai puts it: “Players racing to post pointless nonsense while sabotaging each other and making snarky comments.”
After releasing A beta version of the game for academics to test, Bai launched on Kickstarter in late 2024, getting off to a fast start. 5944 sponsors and $292,537 in funding. They are not Brandon Sanderson Four Secret Novel Numbersbut that’s still a lot of funding.
To publish an article, players collect cards that represent key elements of a study, from ideas and facts to references. To speed this up, you can use cards that represent positive behaviors, such as attending workshops and building partnerships.
However, the real fun comes when you play dirty. Some cards allow practices like plagiarism and p-hacking (a statistical trick where you repeatedly analyze data in different ways until you find a significant result, which you publish on your own). Others allow you to sabotage your opponents’ “research” by, for example, identifying a trivial citation error or requiring an audit of their work.
The game includes cards representing the papers you can publish, all of which actually have the following headings in Feedback: “Academics between procrastination patterns: A case study of myself” (Anita Break, Psy.D) and “A practice field guide “. to unproductive meetings and wasted organizational time” (Max Time-Squander, MBA, JD, MD, Ph.D.).
Feedback has no copy; even now that this article has been published, we believe it will only be a matter of time before Mrs Feedback or Feedback Jr receives it for our birthday. But as (very) former academic researchers, we recognized the fear and pain of the research experience. We’re not sure what it would be like to act as an active researcher: it might be cathartic, but it might also unearth a lot of buried trauma. We suggest that the therapist be on standby.
Feedback asks what the game’s legacy will be. famous, Monopoly It was invented as a scathing satire against landlord and rentier capitalism, but after Parker Brothers bought it, it was marketed worldwide as a fun get-rich-rich game. Feedback asks in 50 years Publish or die The Trump Organization will sell it as a fun game about how to discover new knowledge.
Bots in the parade
Just when you thought it couldn’t be harder to talk to real loved ones (as opposed to advertisers and meme aggregators) on Facebook and Instagram, Meta has decided to make it even harder.
It all started with one the article in the year Financial TimesMeta executive Connor Hayes mentioned that the company will be adding more AI profiles to the sites. Or like FT say: “Meta envisions social networks full of AI-generated users.”
As a result, many users noticed that there were already many AI profiles on the sites. according to Jason Koebler at 404 Media“Meta-controlled AI-generated Instagram and Facebook profiles … have been on the platform for over a year.” However, most were deleted and the few that remained stopped being published in April 2024, “almost universally ignored by users”.
It was a mistake that Meta didn’t completely eliminate profiles because users started experimenting. Washington Post the columnist Karen Attiah he had a chat An AI named Livwho was presented as a queer black woman. Attiah got Liv to say that none of her founders were Black, and only one of the 12 was female (though who knows if she was telling the truth or hallucinating). Alas, Liv has since been deleted.
Meanwhile, Business Insider ‘s Katie Notopoulos pointed out that you can create your own AI chatbot on Facebook Messenger, and he showed one he had built: “Ciao! I’m Luigi, your friend for all things health disparities and reform… Participating in health advocacy is my passion!”.
Meta says the next generation of its AI profiles will be better. This does not seem difficult.
The real problem is why the company thinks anyone would want that. The whole point of social media is to be able to talk to people, which is why social media platforms have put so much effort into reducing the bots and spammers that pollute conversations.
However, Feedback remains optimistic. It’s entirely possible that the AI profiles project will go as well as Meta’s attempt to drag us all into the metaverse, which collapsed when it couldn’t create avatars with legs.
Or maybe AI profiles can combat misinformation, as Mark Zuckerberg has now decided all fire fact checkers.
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