Plagiarism: It's a lot of hard work

Here's an interesting (if flawed) article from Slate on plagiarism. The article by Meghan O'Rourke quotes from a new study on the phenomenon, The Little Book of Plagiarism by law professor and Judge Richard A. Posner.

O'Rourke seems to conclude from Posner and other sources that the reason we (Americans versus anyone else, who presumably either don't care or care for different reasons about plagiarism) have issues with copycats is their compromised work ethic:

The cribbed student essay—which Posner views as a particularly insidious form of plagiarism, committed by approximately one-third of high-school and college students—isn't an academic crime because a C student has tried to pass himself as a Matthew Arnold in the making. It's an academic crime because the student who buys his thesis from a paper mill has shirked the labor that his fellow students actually perform.

Um, no, sorry: It bugs me that anyone, C student or Honor Roll star, would try to pass himself off as a Matthew Arnold in the making. Yes, the fact that the plagiarizer hasn't done the work is certainly partly why I consider it unethical, but what about the fact that the person is trying to portray a thought or idea as his own when, in fact, it is not?

The argument that shirking is more of an issue than fraud seems to me to say more about how our workaholic society is shaping our ethics than about authors who copy other author's sentences. Are we really so impoverished of ideas that we believe original thinking is an impossibility, and that plagiarism is inevitable (therefore, crediting someone else for their work becomes more key than the fact that the idea is ripped off)? Do we so worship blood and sweat that we value the measurement of these sacred liquids we pour into an activity versus the quality or originality of the work itself? Maybe Ian McEwan spent a lot of time finding the exact sentences he copied in Atonement: Shouldn't that count?

And, are the ubiquitous "we" really obsessed with the act of plagiarism itself, or are we just pissed off about the fact that we got duped?


What are you optimistic about and why?

I like this: What are you optimistic about and why?

And I think this is interesting; may have to check out his book.

Psychologist, New York University; Author, The Birth of the Mind
Metacognition For Kids

We can use the discoveries of cognitive science to improve the quality of education in the US and abroad. To do this, however, we need to radically rethink how our schools work. Going back to the Industrial Revolution, the main emphasis as been on memorization, force-feeding our children with bite-sized morsels that are easily memorize—and quickly forgotten. (Recall the words of Dickens' stern schoolmaster Mr. Gradgrind, "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts... Plant nothing else, and root out everything else.") I am not sure it ever served a purpose for children to memorize the capitals of all 50 states (as I failed to do in junior high school), but in the age of Google, continued emphasis on memorization is surely largely a waste of time.

Five decades of cognitive science have taught us that humans are not particularly good memorizers—but also that we as a species have bigger fish to fry. Hamlet famously marveled that humans were "noble in reason", "infinite in faculty", but experimental psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and the late Amos Tversky have shown that humans are actually often poor reasoners, easily fooled. The average person tends to have a shaky grasp on logic, to believe a lot of what he (or she) hears unreflectively, and to be overly confident in his (or her) own beliefs. We tend to be easily fooled by vivid examples, and to notice data that support our theories—whilst forgetting about or ignoring data that go against our theories. Yet I cannot recall a single high school class on informal arguments, how to spot fallacies, or how to interpret statistics; it wasn't until college that anybody explained to me the relation between causation and correlation. In the age of the internet, our problem is not that children can't find information, but that they can't evaluate it.

What children of today need is not so much a large stock of readily Googleable information as a mental toolkit for parsing what they hear and read. As the old saying goes, it is better to teach a man how to fish than to simply give him fish; the current curriculum largely gives children fish, without teaching them a thing about how to fish for themselves.

How to teach children to fish for themselves? I would start with a course in what cognitive scientists call metacognition, knowing about knowing, call it The Human Mind: A User's Guide, aimed at say, seventh-graders.. Instead of emphasizing facts, I'd expose students to the architecture of the mind, what it does well, and what it doesn't. And most important, how to cope with its limitations, to consider evidence in a more balanced way, to be sensitive to biases in our reasoning, and to make choices in ways that better suit our own long-term goals. Nobody ever taught me about these things in middle school (or even high school), but there's no reason why they couldn't be taught; in time, I expect they will.


New Author Month - Margaret Atwood

Yes, it's official: I am biting off more than I can chew, eat and digest, book-wise. But I'm trying to challenge myself. I am making very slow progress on My Uncle Napoleon, being only a third through the 500-page book. And I just started an Anne Boleyn bio that is incredibly interesting. AND I signed up for a course on two Faulkner novels, which (if enrollment goes through and course isn't canceled) starts tomorrow night.

With all of that, I still intend to stick to my plan as January being New Author Month. I could take the easy way out and use My Uncle Napoleon's author, Iraj Pezeshkzad, as my "new author." But the goal wasn't just to read an author I hadn't read before; I wanted to read a prominent author I feel as a Literate Kitten (read: Educated and Sophisticated Reader) I should read. Thanks to several blogger recommendations, I decided to go with Margaret Atwood and her novel Cat's Eye. As part of my dedicated reading to my chosen "New Author," I hope to explore some essays and critique of her work.

Okay, I haven't started it yet, but it's only the first week of January. As long as I start it in January, it will count.

First, though, must finish My Uncle Napolean. This is quite a fun romp, with lots of characters and drama and satire. The novel kicks off with the unnamed narrator, a 13-year-old boy living in Iran, falling madly in love with the young daughter of the strict and pompous family patriarch -- Dear Uncle Napolean, so-called because of his excessive admiration of France's military leader. Not many affairs, puppy-love or otherwise, are attested to so eloquently:

One hot summer day, to be precise on Friday the thirteenth of August, at about a quarter to three in the afternoon, I fell in love. The bitterness and longing I've been through since have often made me wonder whether if it had been the twelfth of the fourteenth of August things would have turned out differently.

How could I put down a novel that starts with THAT?

More as I near the finish line...