Now look, I am cool with “we” that means “one”, to celebrate the fact that the validity of mathematical statements is independent of the person who happens to claim them, as in “Dividing by \pi, we get that the game admits an equilibrium”. But sometimes the automatic replacement of `I’ with `we’ garbles the meaning of the sentence. When I write “I call such a sequence of variables a random play”, the singular pronoun implies that this is not a universally recognized definition, but one that I have invented for the current paper. Change this “I” to “we”, as the journal did, and the implication is lost. And sometimes `we’ for `one’ is just ridiculous, as in “We review Martin’s Theorem in the appendix”. It is one thing to say that every intelligent creature recognizes that the game admits an equilibrium, and another thing to say that every intelligent creature reviews Martin’s Theorem in the appendix.

We agree.

Advertisement