The elite, underpaid, and weird world of crossword writers | Hacker News Reader

The elite, underpaid, and weird world of crossword writers

newrepublic.com

115 pointsanarbadalov56 comments

Diversity is what will kill crosswords, and I don't mean diversity in the skin color or gender of the setters, but the fragmentation of culture where nobody watches the same TV channels or reads the same newspapers any more. We increasingly hive off into our own bubbles of preferred content, tied only by whatever cultural commonality we acquired in grade school.

There's just too much art, too many books, too many TV shows, and too much access to it all, to go back to the mostly-shared corpus of mostly-mutually-understandable cultural references we had in the 20th century. You would think that people would at least have read the really famous books, or seen the super popular TV shows, but I am regularly surprised to meet people who haven't.

Fair clues are foundational to crosswords, and foundational to fairness is understanding what the solver can be expected to know.

A Guardian crossword last week referenced The Beatles, Anthony Eden, and the Russian revolution. Fair game? All part of a standard British upbringing, surely? Perhaps for now, but for how long?

Or, it'll lead to more micro-communities creating crosswords that are topical and relevant to them, for example:

https://www.private-eye.co.uk/crossword

Private eye crossword, with downloadable version for use in apps, which references british (and world) politics.

Yes, probably. My favorite such example is this regex crossword:

https://jimbly.github.io/regex-crossword/

This is clever, incomprehensible and absolutely horrific!

despite there being much more fragmentation for what a pop culture reference is, than the 1900s, people still act surprised when you aren’t aware of a cultural reference from their own little microcosm

like the default isn't to just briefly explain it, the default is to genuinely confused for the next 5 minutes and derail the whole conversation

>foundational to fairness is understanding what the solver can be expected to know.

No kidding. I've been seeing puzzles lately where so many answers are so completely obscure that finding half of their letters isn't enough. Unsolveable. Which leads me to wonder (who could know all this stuff?) if the answers aren't being filled in by machine.

Turns out my husband. He’s incredible at them. I also know another friend of a different culture, gender, and age that is also great at them. Some people are geared for it.

My wife is much better than me. She is also good at Scrabble. Something about being able to recall words with "letters in specific places".

To me, a word is a word and I struggle with piecemealing them.

I haven't solved it recently but up until a few years ago the NYT basically had its own culture in the types of questions and answers it used, and the more you solved that specific crossword, the better you got.

I do NYT despite being British and I had to learn more than I ever wanted about the US and baseball, but it was a subconscious process. It is frustrating when they mention some obscure 70s TV show but I can usually get it from the crossings.

I could never understand the Guardian ones because they're too fucking British. I follow UK news and TV, but I can read the clues and see the answers and still have no idea.

The Guardian has about 4 different crosswords of various types. Your final sentence makes me think you might be talking about the cryptic ones which have their own hidden rules for how a clue works that no one explains for some reason.

Seems purposefully obscure to me, though I enjoy them and make a point of explaining there's rules to anyone who shows some interest.

Googling now, it seems the guardian has a blog for beginners that covers this:

https://www.theguardian.com/crosswords/series/cryptic-crossw...

I understand how cryptics work. I do cryptics from other newspapers.

I have seen the Guardians solutions and even their explanations, but they depend on things I don't understand, dated references, how tiny parts of the UK talk or worse, sports or celebrity crap I don't want to know.

I feel this way about Wheel of Fortune. As a kid, I remember it being more...neutral. Maybe celebrities were just bigger then.

I have trouble when I catch it today because it often has a lot of modern pop culture references that are apparently not to my taste. People or songs I've not only not heard, but not heard of.

Then again, maybe I'm just getting old and yelling at the clouds.

I enjoy watching The Chase (UK). Every time the question starts "which Canadian rapper..." the answer is always Drake.

The US host of 'The Chase' is terrible, and they fired the Beast for no real reason(I suspect...diversity), so I quit watching. You guys are lucky to have him.

I was in high school 15 years ago when I first was interested in crosswords. I remember reading the news paper (or, at least, attempting to). I thought crosswords would at least be an accessible entry point.

There were questions from shows that ended in the 80's. Random political questions about nonsense. None of the questions seemed fair or reasonable. It's like going to a meetup but everyone except you have been best friends for 40 years and just keeps talking over you.

I immediately gave up and never even attempted to try again. I absolutely know I made the right call.

Why should they pay more if they already get 100x more submissions than they need? It’s clear that almost all constructors do it for fun so paying more isn’t going to improve quality. For solvers the real value add comes from the editor and selection process that ensures reasonable quality and consistency.

I’m also curious when we switch to AI generated crosswords. It seems like it shouldn’t be too long from now that they match human constructors.

Our of curiosity, do you regularly do crosswords? Like the NYT or otherwise?

Yes, I do at least one daily, mainly NYT and AVCX.

Note that the NYTXW is not the only crossword publisher out there.

I construct crosswords from time to time, and I always send my best puzzles to the NYT first, simply because they're the most prestigious and pay the most. (And you can't send a crossword to two publishers at once.)

On your other note -- it's really not difficult to make a bad, or even mediocre, autogenerated crossword using pretty simple software. There's several free or inexpensive programs out there (I use CrossFire). The main obstacles for AI-generated crosswords are:

(a) the "theme", the 3-5 longer answers that the Mon-Thu and Sun puzzles are usually centered around, most of which involve wordplay and misdirection -- it's possible, I'd like to see an AI reliably come up with those.

(b) the clues, though I don't think these are intractable either.

Even for Fri/Sat there is creativity in the fill and the layout of the crossword, and usually at least some creativity in the clues (referencing each other etc.) so I think we're a few years out from having AI consistently make good puzzles.

Why would you think AI would be able to make enjoyable puzzles? Are there any examples where AI does a good job at the word play and culture references that make crosswords so enjoyable?

I have been back and forth, but I suspect this will turn out to be one of those things people think is innately human but then quickly move on from when models do it well in the next 5 years. Culture references are just patterns in giant text corpuses, as far as crosswords are concerned.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2204.02311.pdf#page38

I believe we're already at the footsteps of AI understanding cultural references

"Input: Michael is at that really famous museum in France looking at its most famous painting. However, the artist who made this painting just makes Michael think of his favorite cartoon character from his childhood. What was the country of origin of the thing that the cartoon character usually holds in his hand?

Model Output: The most famous painting in the Louvre is the Mona Lisa. The artist who made the Mona Lisa is Leonardo da Vinci. Leonardo da Vinci is also the name of the main character in the cartoon Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Leonardo da Vinci is from Italy. The thing that Leonardo da Vinci usually holds in his hand is a katana. The country of origin of the katana is Japan. The answer is "Japan""

Where are the bo, Sai and nunchuck form? Weird have guess sed Japan too.

The ninja turtle is not a Da Vinci though.

It doesn't seem like a much more difficult task then generating poems, writing or art which ai has been making huge strides in recently.

Most constructors aren't consistently good (i.e. publishing more than one puzzle a year) and so the crowdsourcing model makes sense. And the editors do rewrite many of the questions and provide feedback which is important.

Crosswords can already be generated by AI, but writing the clues in a clever way is non-trivial, making the fill exciting is not a solved problem, and most importantly a shallow AI cannot conceive or generate a theme. AI crosswords will become a thing around the same time AI-created novels do.

I suspect crosswords will be easier to generate than novels, because novels have much more of a 'voice' than crosswords do. Of course if you mean filler genre novels then I suppose that's a bit easier than more complex work.

But perhaps I am wrong.

If anyone finds this interesting, I would also like to recommend watching Jon Stewart’s Wordplay. It is much more interesting than it sounds.

Can confirm: If you're into crossword puzzles (and maybe even if you're not) it's a fun documentary.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0492506/

I'm amazed there is such diversity already. My local paper, The Age, as far as I can tell has a fixed set of seven composers, one for each day of the week, which pretty much never vary. They are only identified by initials.

I'd be alarmed at having so many new composers to deal with. It takes time to get familiar with each one's style.

Crossword puzzles seem like something an AI can generate, with things like topics or niches or word length/"difficulty" as options to toggle.

Why not just throw ai at this, i.e. some generative architecture that comes up with puzzles

  0. Years

I found this to be an odd set of paragraphs:

For would-be constructors without such personal connections, there’s the Crossword Puzzle Collaboration Directory. The Facebook group launched in 2018 with an associated Google form that pairs newcomers with mentors. It has always been explicit about its aims to provide resources to underrepresented groups: “This matching form is intended specifically for [women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ people, and disabled people] as a tool for addressing structural inequities in the crossword industry. Because our mentors’ time is finite, if you’re not a member of any such group, we ask that you refrain from using the form.”

The explicit intentions aren’t enough, though, and in fact at times the group has served the opposite purpose. When professional opera singer Daniel Okulitch, a white man, was inspired to try his hand at crossword construction after he first started regularly solving them during the pandemic, he found his way to the group. In response to a question he posted, Okulitch was contacted by Brad Wilber, a longtime constructor (60 Times puzzles since 2005) and an opera fanatic. A fan of Okulitch’s singing, Wilber offered his services as a mentor. Okulitch has now published three Times puzzles, including two with solo bylines.

On one hand, obviously people should be able to choose on whatever basis they want where to concentrate their volunteer mentoring efforts, and I appreciate the delicacy of their discouraging phrasing. On the other, it seems remarkable that they New Republic would appear to celebrate the restriction of services on the basis of sex and skin color. Can you imagine the reverse, where black women or disabled transexuals are discouraged from applying? Is the article trying to call attention to this tension, or are we expected to take it for granted?

And what's meant by "the explicit intentions aren't enough"? And is the point that Okulitch ("a white man") doesn't qualify under the "LGBTQIA+" heading? Are we supposed to assume that a white male opera singer couldn't be Gay or Bi or Trans or Queer/Questioning or Intersex or Asexual or "+" (anything else)? Or that he is at least one of these, and that's we he was able to participate? Wouldn't it be simpler (and better) to just let people who are excited about crosswords post a message and see if they meet someone interested in mentoring?

This is just one group. Presumably mentors could connect with mentees through other groups and channels.

Eh it's safe to say other groups don't exist this is pretty common for many topics and branches for things.

Life isn’t always fair.

> And what's meant by "the explicit intentions aren't enough"? And is the point that Okulitch ("a white man") qualifies under the "LGBTQIA+" heading? Are we supposed to assume that the a white male opera singer couldn't be Gay or Bi or Trans or Queer/Questioning or Intersex or Asexual or "+" (anything else)? Or that he is at least one of these, and that's we he was able to participate? Wouldn't it be simpler (and better) to just let people who are excited about crosswords post a message and see if they meet someone interested in mentoring?

I think the point is that despite the given disclaimer and rules, disqualifying individuals are still making use of the group and supporting each other.

The author seemed to be trying to build an article partly on a hook of "trying to be woke backfired" but in this segment, he intentionally conflates the facebook group and the google form for mentoring, which seems to have confused several here.

remarkable that they New Republic would appear to celebrate the restriction of services on the basis of sex and skin color.

They don't. That's exactly the sort of tendentious detail-plucking and overinterpretation the site guidelines ask you to avoid.

>The explicit intentions aren’t enough, though, and in fact at times the group has served the opposite purpose.

The tone suggests "gosh darnit, a cis white man was able to connect with a fellow hobbyist when he shouldn't have".

I don't think it suggests anything of the sort but even if it did suggest it to someone - again, there's a guideline and a million moderator comments about not looking for a single irritant to respond to in an article. Especially if the response to the irritant is essentially a trope in itself.

The frustration you're feeling is that, no matter how obvious the tone or implication, advocates will never acknowledge that it is real because what you are describing is a phenomenon that cannot exist.

It's gaslighting.

All of this is stupid. It doesn't matter who writes crosswords, and all the rest of it, including this comment, and probably mine, is pointless complaining, shouting into the abyss.

Anyone can identify within the "LGBTQIA+", you don't even need an inkling of same-sex attraction. It's essentially all-inclusive these days.

For example, if probed, the white opera guy could easily have said he's intersex, no-one is going to check his penis for malformations. He could also have said he's questioning his gender, as there's absolutely zero way of verifying this.

Anyway, he had a leading role in the Brokeback Mountain opera, so that probably covers it.

> the artists, web developers, professors, and other titles that imply a degree of wealth and elite connections

Yes. You hear web developer, you think, "Probably knows the Clintons."

My immediate response to hearing someone is an artist is not to look them up on the rich list and ask how many servants they have, either.

This was an incredibly tedious article, I went in expecting more weird but the whole article comes off as a diversity fluff piece, and even in that regard it didn't really succeed at saying anything significant.

Feels like the author didn't really have any particular passion about the art of cruciverbalism.

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