16 KiB
[meta] Weekly Challenge on the Decline?
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Author: u/Kishoto *
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/3ki40x/meta_weekly_challenge_on_the_decline/
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Score: 2
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Created: 2015-09-11T04:36:19
Post:
Ok, so is it just me, or does there seem to be a declining interest in the weekly challenges? As in there appears to be less submissions overall, and less people involved in active discussion of them? While the comment amounts may seem large on a few of the recent ones, it's to be noted that a lot of them are generated by back-and-forth discussion among the same set of users. (edit: as opposed to active discussion among a good spread of users, as it appeared to be in the first few weeks)
If I'm incorrect, then by all means, explain why I am. If I am right, though, then can people tell me why this is? I personally love the weekly challenge, it gives me an excuse to write short stories, my preferred medium.
Anyway. So. Thoughts?
Comments:
u/Farmerbob1 [+10] Level 1 author (16 minutes later)
If I'm not mistaken, most colleges and schools have been in session long enough that the students amongst us might be needing to concentrate on their curriculum. That wasn't why I stopped participating, I was busy with other things too, but not school.
u/Kishoto [+4] (46 minutes later)
Fair point, an obvious conclusion that hadn't occurred to me, which is doubly sad because I ran a survey months ago that made it clear most of the sub is in their late teens to early twenties, making the schooling answer an obvious first guess.
u/xamueljones [+4] My arch-enemy is entropy (37 minutes later)
I can say that this is the main reason why I haven't contributed to the challenges, even though I wanted to write for Dueling Time Travelers. However, I fully intend to post something for Orange and Blue Morality.
u/avret [+1] SDHS rationalist (17 hours later)
Same reason I didn't write for dueling time travelers--i have limited amounts of writing time weekly and I prefer to spend it writing chapters of longer fics.
u/alexanderwales [+6] Time flies like an arrow (10 hours later)
I think in part it depends on the prompt. I also think that the start of school probably had an impact. We'll see how this week's prompt does? Overall I'm not too worried about it.
Challenge Date Entries "Portal Fantasy" 6/17/15 13 "One-Man Industrial Revolution" 6/24/15 6 "Buggy Matrix" 7/1/15 7 "Ever After" 7/8/15 8 "The Chosen One" 7/15/15 7 "Rational Horror" 7/22/15 4 "The Chessmaster" 7/29/15 4 "Clones, Clones, Clones!" 8/5/15 4 "Disney Movies" 8/12/15 6 "Science Is Bad" 8/19/15 4 "Dueling Time Travelers" 8/26/15 4 "Dinosaurs!" 9/2/15 1
u/None [+3] (8 hours later)
I keep having to wörk. It's unpleasant.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
Without implied criticism I'd like to say then it might be time to find a new profession.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
No, that's not quite it. Or at least, that's not all of it.
Like, yeah, I liked academia more on a daily basis, but that was at least partially due to having (mostly) my own office then, as opposed to working in an open space now. I like people, but I also find exposure to people stressful. Industry is at least managing to involve working on the kinds of stuff I always wanted to as a kid, which provides me somewhat productive and certainly interesting challenges, and it also pays me real-person money and gives me some of the evenings, almost all of the weekends, and eventually vacations off.
Those latter advantages (money and time) are biiiig advantages over academia, which theoretically has a lot of freedom, but actually involves being constantly judged for your ability to produce top-n-percent work on unrealistically short deadlines when you could be knocked out at any stage and often end up working weekends, evenings, and holidays anyway for dismally low pay.
So overall, I find the actual act of working to be, well, not exactly fun, but at least fairly interesting and doable. It helps that my coworkers are fairly nice people, too, and I get paid well and given time off (not a lot, but about average for people who work one professional job in this workaholic country).
What actually depresses me is just how little time and energy I end up having for anything else after I'm done with working 40-45 hours/week. Exactly because the work is interestingly challenging, I spend much of my mornings and evenings exhausted. My hobbies have slowed to a crawl, but on the other hand, a crawl is faster than they went in graduate school!
And overall, I'm just sort of existentially horrified by the seeming "eternity" of working life in the same way that most people are of dying. I mean, how much actual fun, enjoyment, and meaning can I squeeze into life when this is most of it? I feel pretty ok about work when I'm doing it, but then I reflect on what happened to my whole fucking week and feel dismal.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (a day later)
I feel pretty ok about work when I'm doing it, but then I reflect on what happened to my whole fucking week and feel dismal.
I know what you mean, though I've found it useful to try and step back from the inanity and try to look at the overall utility, so I can collect my hedons.
It also helps to take a bureaucrat view, I've been a bureaucrat, so I have a very realistic (read dismally pessimistic) of how long it takes to change things for the better, but slow improvement is still improvement.
I didn't realize you worked in academia, it's one of those things I think about doing as a retirement.
u/None [+1] (a day later)
I didn't realize you worked in academia, it's one of those things I think about doing as a retirement.
I did up until six months ago, as a graduate student. Academia is definitely what I would consider my "passion career", in the sense that if I didn't actually have to worry about money, hours, travel, and job-security, I would do it. I like research, I actually enjoy teaching. It's the profession whose "core values" I actually feel and endorse to a great degree, in the sense of not feeling like a fucking hypocrite or tourist when referring to that profession in the first-person plural and talking about "our" important role in society.
It's certainly "that one job", where I couldn't really get why people were so weirdly eager to leave academia and go spend their lives in cubicle farms.
It's also hideously, soul-crushingly exploitative, stressful, demeaning, and abusive. I have sat in the home of one of my stepfather's colleagues (so: stepfather is a tenured prof in EE and the colleague is one in CS), and he fucking told me to never get a PhD and go get a "real job", because the academic system these days is just never going to hire people for permanent, full-time positions or treat people reasonably again. Basically all the statistics agree: after filtering out the stupids, the lazies, and the incompetents in the process of undergrad and graduate school, there will only ever be enough tenure-track jobs for something like 10%-20% of PhD graduates, and only some fraction of those will actually obtain tenure (ie: turn their research aspirations into a permanent career). And the whole thing is really classist and elitist.
Meanwhile, you're working long hours and accepting a low salary the whole time, starting right when you enter graduate school, or even in undergrad. And being demeaned and insulted by having to prove, over and over again, at every fucking stage, that you're brilliant enough to keep the job you already have for a few more years. Oh, and subjected to Reviewer 2.
And yes, I just wrote that long rant instead of getting on with my life because I fucking care.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (2 days later)
I agree. I'm a grad student at the moment getting my masters, and I'm basically doing software engineering prototyping for my masters, I have little to no interest at this point of getting a PhD, despite many mentors encouraging me to, and one good soul I admire explaining why I should not. If I teach it most likely will be as an associate professor.
I'm doing my thesis in industrially appplied OCR, how about you?
u/None [+1] (2 days later)
My MSc thesis was in software-engineering metrics, treated statistically. On the upside, it got me into statistics. On the downside, it's a shitty, unrigorous subject and my advisor doesn't succeed in publishing very often because of that.
u/blazinghand [+3] Chaos Undivided (14 hours later)
just seems like dinoasaurs wasn't popular
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (14 hours later)
I am curious why that's a bad prompt, if it was a bad prompt, mostly so that I can avoid giving a prompt like that again. Two of what I'd consider the most influential science fiction stories of all time featured dinosaurs: Jurassic Park and A Sound of Thunder. But I suppose I can see where it wouldn't capture the attention of a rationalist, since while they're cool or flashy, there's nothing particularly "thinky" about them.
u/xamueljones [+4] My arch-enemy is entropy (19 hours later)
I think it's because most of the other prompts were rather easy to generate "thinky" problems for and Dinosaurs are simply about dealing dinosaurs and everything I came up with sounded like an action scene from Jurassic Park.
I personally think that writing rational fiction can sometimes be harder than being a rationalist if only because you not only have to come up with rational behaviors and actions, you also have to come up with a problem with a solution that involves thinking instead of just having a simple answer of being dependent brave, charismatic, or some non-mental quality.
Also, Dinosaurs just coincided with the first week of September which is when a lot of us start the school year. This probably is the bigger reason than everything I said above.
EDIT: If the weekly challenge does start dropping off, I suggest making it into a monthly challenge and several associated threads devoted to giving each other ideas polishing entering contestant's stories. Like a Rational version of NaNoRiMo, except without the length requirement.
u/electrace [+2] (22 hours later)
The problem I had with the Dinosaurs prompt was that it was a little limiting.
You can either do Jurassic Park (which has been done), time travel (which was the prior week's prompt), or something really weird (which either ends up being hand-wavy, or ends up taking a lot of text to close plot holes), like alien dinosaurs.
I'm not saying it can't be done with the dinosaurs prompt, it would just take a ton of work to think of something creative that is both effectively communicated, and rational, in the span of a short story.
As a side note: I wrote a Wolly Mammoth story, but wasn't completely happy with it, and decided not to post it.
u/blazinghand [+1] Chaos Undivided (15 hours later)
That's a good question! I'd have expected some dinosaur action too. I think a lot of the prompts actively suggested something rational(ist) like Dueling Time Travelers or Rational Horror, whereas Dinos seemed a little open-ended and not focused? That being said Disney Movies didn't suggest anything besides Disney Movies and that went well.
Since I don't write often I can't say what caused the decline, as I made the same decision I usually do.
u/JackStargazer [+1] Primordial Apologist (22 hours later)
I mostly wrote for rational horror because I had the idea beforehand, while reading one of the Friendship is Optimal spin off stories, and the prompt was the perfect kick in the ass to get me to actually write it.
u/Farmerbob1 [+1] Level 1 author (17 hours later)
Nothing "thinky" about Dinosaurs? That depends. I have a race in one of my stories that is an offshoot of the Troodon dinosaurs, who very aggressively self-selected for intelligence and magical ability for about seventy million years before the story. They are rather "thinky." I'm looking forward to writing in that universe again soon.
u/wendigo_days [+3] (18 hours later)
Weekly is way too often, there are no good rewards, and the clinical, self-contained and frequent nature of the contest robs it of even the glory that would be the prime one. What if the contests were monthly, and preceded by a discussion thread where people were encouraged to bat around ideas? That would also give people who didn't care enough to execute a story an avenue to contribute and engage. Just the act of making a new thread to discuss the winning story, and a flair, would go a long way. You could also hand out, idk, discussion time with alexanderwales or something.
Again though, weekly is way too frequent for something like this, especially in such a small community and without a material reward.
Also worth pointing out that the sub has sort of stultified, with more focus on consumption than original discussion.
All this comes with the caveat that I haven't been following these contests. And indeed (edit) it looks like you already had a reward flair.
u/IomKg [+1] (16 hours later)
The only thing I could contribute is that at least personally the reason I am commenting and reading less is a combination of reading some of the previous winners\top few stories and while feeling they were OK didnt feel most were good enough. Meaning if I happened to see a book\story starting like them I probably wouldnt have continued too far. And this was combined with story prompts I didnt find particularly interesting caused Me to, not too intentionally, indefinitely postpone reading each prompt till the point that the next one came out.