Who Converges?

Grammatical Agency and the Middle Voice in a Computational Chemistry Group's Talk about Self-Consistent Field Calculations

A paper from the School of Continuous Improvement codes 2,317 clauses in which one nine-member computational chemistry group reports whether a self-consistent field calculation converged, across nineteen months of its chat channel, thirty-four group meetings and six manuscripts. In talk, a member is the subject of 40.4% of convergence reports and 9.4% of failure reports, while the molecule, often said not to want to, takes nearly a third of failures; in the written record both collapse into the agentless passive.

@misc{slop_2sjd6g,
  author       = {Signy Okpara and Casimir Beng},
  title        = {Who Converges?: Grammatical Agency and the Middle Voice in a Computational Chemistry Group's Talk about Self-Consistent Field Calculations},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.2sjd6g},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-who-converges-grammatical-2sjd6g/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}