“I only care about what a few people think of my work and they are already aware of what I produce. Think of me as a ‘professional loser.’”
A researcher wrote that to me last week. I’d cold-emailed them to pitch Loud Camel, the thing I’m building, and instead of the brush-off I expected, I got two thoughtful replies and a PDF: A. C. Leopold’s 1973 paper “Games Scientists Play,” the one that coined “professional loser.” They wanted me to know which segment of my market they belonged to, and to register that they considered the label, in their words, “silly and testosterone-driven.”
I want to defend them, mostly. And then I want to point at the single assumption holding their position up, because I think it’s quietly breaking.
What Leopold got right, and what’s ugly about it
Leopold describes scientists chasing prizes, gaming citation counts, publishing in prestige journals even when, he notes, “most people who are interested in the subject of your paper may not read that journal.” Swap a few nouns and he’s describing LinkedIn. He wrote the attention economy in 1973, before anyone called it that.
The ugly part is the title. A scientist who won’t compete for attention is, to him, “tantamount to being a professional loser,” and he found an “alarming proportion” of them. That’s the part the researcher rejected, and they’re right to. Reticence isn’t a moral failure. Some of the best people I know would rather be correct than be noticed.
The loser’s bet, stated fairly
“The few people who matter already know my work.” For a human field, that isn’t denial, it’s an accurate model of how reputation actually moves. Leopold himself, later in the same paper, lands on the same mechanism: scientists run on what he calls “strokes,” small signs of recognition, and “a stroke is only as good as the stroker.” Being known by the three people who define your subfield is worth more than being seen by ten thousand strangers. The professional loser has simply noticed this and refused to chase the strangers. Rational.
It even has range. The researcher granted, generously, that “being noticed is better than the alternative,” only that it is “necessary but not sufficient.” I agree with every word.
The assumption underneath it
Here’s the load-bearing assumption, the one nobody states because until recently it never needed stating: the people who decide whether your work gets found are people.
That’s the part that’s changing. More and more, the first pass over the literature isn’t done by the three colleagues who know your name. It’s done by a model. Someone asks ChatGPT or a research tool what’s known about X, and the tool returns what it can retrieve and silently drops the rest. A paper nobody can find isn’t judged on its merits. It just isn’t in the room.
Reputation-agnostic is not obscurity-proof
The researcher saw this coming, partly. They wrote that by “being more agnostic to reputation,” LLMs “may erode current practices.” True. A model doesn’t care that you’re a full professor, or that you publish once a decade. The optimistic read is that this rescues the professional loser: a reputation-blind reader should surface good obscure work on merit, no self-promotion required.
I don’t buy it, and the reason is one short distinction. Agnostic to reputation is not the same as agnostic to findability. The model doesn’t skip your paper because it’s unimpressed by you. It skips your paper because it can’t retrieve it. Reputation-blind, yes. Obscurity-proof, no.
This is what actually changed for the professional loser. The old stance was protected by human colleagues who carried your work around in their heads and brought it up when it was relevant. They remembered you. The model remembers no one. It doesn’t snub the obscure, it just can’t reach them. “The few who matter already know my work” was a fine bet while the few were people. It gets shakier every quarter that the few include something that has never heard of you and never will.
I might be wrong
The honest hedge: maybe the tools get good enough that retrieval stops rewarding the findable and starts genuinely finding everything, indexing the forgotten preprint and the badly titled 2009 paper as readily as the loud stuff. If that happens, the professional loser was right all along and I’m selling umbrellas in a drought. It’s possible. I’d just rather my work be in the index while we find out.
I wrote the broader, less science-flavored version of this argument over in my newsletter, On professional losers. And I owe the whole train of thought to the researcher who called themselves one, and then handed me a 53-year-old paper to argue with. The best kind of reply to a cold email.