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Bill Ackman is going to manage to turn and burn academia to the ground. We're seeing a confluence of factors:
-- Plagiarism has become such a complex and overinclusive concept that it's impossible to actually do academic work at volume without either committing plagiarism or specifically acting to avoid plagiarism while still technically doing the same thing (ie, carefully rephrasing the same thought to avoid copy-paste). The best comparison I can think of is NFL football: the definition of what constitutes a "catch" a "fumble" or being "in bounds" is obvious at human speeds, slow everything down to frame-by-frame from four angles and it suddenly gets really complicated, to the point where I have no earthly idea what pass interference is, and the review officials have to impute intent into micro-gestures during intense physical violence. Plagiarism rules simply weren't designed for a world where powerful computers instantaneously compare every combination of words used in a 500 page work to every other combination of words ever combined in human history. God forbid we get to the point where HallMonitorGPT can interpret meanings and compare and cite them. Everyone is committing plagiarism all the time, if anyone has the energy to look into it.
-- Culture War has created a real team effort at destroying random people on each "side."
-- Bill Ackman's wife had Academia as her rich lady hobby. Which, on the grand scale of rich lady hobbies, is actually pretty admirable. But she got got. And Bill Ackman is showing his whole ass on Twitter and live interviewed on CNBC about it. He's hopping mad and going on the warpath to defend his wife and expose those attacking her.
-- Claudine Gay got got on plagiarism to avoid firing her for racism. That incentivizes the other team to get some of their opps.
Expect a ton of attacks on academics at every level for the next few months.
Different types of plagiarism. Copy pasting has plausible deniability as an error. Rearranging text and word substitution is worse, as it shows intent.
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I think that this is completely wrong and that you haven't actually done anything to demonstrate this at all. I can see multiple groups and people putting out original scholarship, and it isn't hard to avoid plagiarism if you're actually doing an experiment and trying to replicate something. People put out original research and academic work all the time without plagiarising - for example, look at the work that's being done on reading the Pompeii papyri.
On the other hand, I think that plagiarism is a huge problem in the field of academic functionaries who aren't capable of doing actual academic work, and those are just a lot more prominent at the moment because there are so many useless midwits in academia staffing various diversity sinecures. In that world, you get your job on the basis of your identity and your friends, with the academic work being little more than a paper requirement. These people aren't trying to study or advance human knowledge, they're trying to claw down a fat paycheck for doing nothing/pursuing the political goals they wanted to pursue anyway. Plagiarism is going to be a big problem in this cohort because as far as they're concerned the actual work of academia is not something they're there for, so why not plagiarise?
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If someone told me “Hedge fund manager goes scorched earth over antisemitism and plagiarism controversy,” I’d immediately guess “Who is Bill Ackman?”.
Ackman’s long been one of my favorite PG-rated lolcows. Rated PG as in you can discuss his hijinks with your coworkers and family in a way you can’t about Chris Chan or Twitch thots.
Two of my other favorite hits from him was the massive beef and money between Ackman and Carl Icahn over Herbalife (I was rooting for Ackman, btdubs) which Ackman lost, as well as taking another L in an infamous “bike trip” story (DESPITE being just a small part of most our meat-space lives, bikes comprise a disproportionately large role in funny phenomena):
As to the Ackman antisemitism/plagiarism brouhaha, I’m also rooting for him to prevail against journalists and university administrators in this particular case. However, it’s also the case that I believe (like some others in this thread), that Ackman is only upset because it was his particular identity politics ox that got gored.
He doesn’t mind the presence of leopards, just whose faces they are eating.
I disagree.
I see "plagiarism" as something more like traveling in basketball, where mostly everyone would agree taking five dribbleless steps while running in action is less forgivable than taking three while walking the ball up the court in the beginning of a possession. Especially when examining casual players, most basketball-familiar people can identify traveling when they see it (like pornography) and judge its severity even if complications like jump steps, floating dribbles, and step-throughs can appear.
Lifting entire passages without attribution would be like the five dribbleless steps mid-action; insufficiently rewording some well-known-in-the-field information in a sentence or two would be like the three steps while walking up the court.
To continue the metaphor, I think the current cycle of feud and violence is going to look like this: imagine if the NBA sat down at the end of the season and identified travels in video of every game, and docked the team "convicted" of the travel points that the league determined resulted from the travel, and if the docked points were enough they started revoking wins. Imagine they started with the Lakers, and docked the Lakers several wins. Well then Lakers fans would naturally go through every other team's games, and point out uncalled travels, and pretty soon the results of any close game are in question.
Combine this with the tendency of twitter to report "Eleven instances of plagiarism have been found in the work of Dr. X" and you get a pretty toxic stew.
I agree with you that context is everything, I'm not arguing that plagiarism is everywhere in the sense that no one has original ideas. I'm arguing that a motivated reader can locate a possible accusation of plagiarism in almost any work, which will then be fed to the slaughterhouse of social media.
Joke's on them, there is effectively no other team in academia.
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lol yeah forgot about Herbalife. He kept adding to the short position and dumped it all at a huge loss 5 years later. And now Carl Icahn has problems of his own, as his fund's dividend rate is less stable than originally assumed to be. I think the recurring theme is that these bigshot money managers are entertainment value only as egos clash. Stick to index funds otherwise.
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Ackman's turn has been pretty remarkable. He's posting memes from EndWokeness on Twitter now.
Until recently, we saw most billionaires give lip service to diversity and other progressive shibboleths. They'd give some sort of weak pushback like "As a lifelong Democrat, I'm concerned by..." but they'd never actually fight the powers that be.
Now, people like Ackman have joined the other team. They are saying, explicitly, that wokeness is bad, academics are racist, and we need to vote for actual Republicans to change things.
Billionaires have never been fans of wokeness ,as they know if wokeness is carried out to its eventual end, they will be among the first to be shaken down. I think Ackman has voiced sentiment that many others share but afraid to voice. Zuckerberg is not a big fan of the woke either.
The first I've heard. Didn't he donate massive amounts of money towards helping Democrats win in 2020 by hook or crook? That's despite the fact that they hate him and that previous progressive donations have blown up in his face.
I'd love to be pointed in the direction of anything anti-woke coming from the Zuck.
As an insider, wokes in the company had been railing against Thiel being on the board for years and years. Zuck always stood up for him.
Zuck would go along with diversity initiatives but was never the one pounding the drum. The most I can remember him being fired up about woke politics is when somebody crossed out “Black Lives Matter” on a chalkboard.
COVID censorship, even inside the company, was absurd though. Mass deletions of comments for not citing “reputable” sources, for which the definition of reputable was secret and somehow didn’t include university professors.
I got the impression that Zuck is a pretty standard Silicon Valley paternalistic tech idealist.
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Protection money is a thing. The left hate him because he has not done enough to stop alleged misinformation on the platform, and also his denial of Facebook's role in affecting the 2016 election..
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While I am not sympathetic to people seeing the sinister hand of Da Joos everywhere, there are some patterns that are real, and one I have seen lately, of which Bill Ackman is a notable example, is of prominent Jews who were full-throated supporters of DEI and wokeness suddenly being shocked, shocked, to discover that Palestinians > Israelis/Jews. This shocking discovery causing them to suddenly reevaluate their allyship and leading to hand-wringing articles by Jews about how they are walking away from The Left/the Democratic Party, etc.
I don't have a lot of respect for people who suddenly do a heel-face turn because their ox got got.
Ackman was optimistic about Trump in 2016 and supported him https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2016/11/bill-ackman-president-trump
Business people tend to flip-flop though or hold contradicting opinions. Mark Cuban is seen as woke but he used to be more libertarian or even conservative https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2015/08/12/mark-cuban-would-love-to-be-a-republican-if-it-werent-for-the-republican-party/
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I'd still be happy they were shooting in the proper direction... if they kept shooting in the proper direction rather than returning to the fold as soon as their ox get a reprieve.
Is their ox gonna get a reprieve? Seems like the respectable center left which goes "ok, discriminate against whites but make an exception for Jews no seriously make an exception for Jews" has lost control of the narrative.
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Nope. Ackman has decided to back a full-on DEI supporter for President. His "wokeness is bad" stuff was all tactical, perhaps to get the help of Rufo. Now that he's got the head he wanted, he's back to full DEI (provided his people are on the correct side of the progressive stack).
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We're not talking very sophisticated, "this sequence of five words resembles a use of five words scattered throughout an entire paper" stuff here, at least if I believe what I'm hearing about my nephew, who is doing teaching work as part of his PhD and thus grading papers: one example was a student who didn't even change the name on the plagiarized paper.
I think if you can't even manage to change (not real names) "Ramchandra Paresh" to "Billy Murphy", we are not talking the highest levels of academic achievement being stifled by over-zealous sniffing out of plagiarism.
You kinda missed the point I'm getting at. I'm saying that plagiarism claims are probably universal if you dig hard enough among academics. And given that we aren't really equipped to parse the severity of those claims, we're just going to keep score by "Dr. ABC had X number of claims of plagiarism against them" that's the whole tweet. Once you get a complex enough set of rules, everyone is in violation of something all the time. Like land use ordinances or holding in the NFL, the refs call it when they want a particular result.
There are very high profile academics whose work actually gets cited and picked over just for the intellectual benefit from doing so. If their work had plagiarism it would be found out already. That, there also exists this class of hangers on who just create make work articles and think of academia as a grift they can make easy money out of, is one of the biggest faults of academia.
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I'm wondering if cheating students become cheating professors. If the attitude is shifting towards "pfft, who writes their own paper, that's dumb when you can buy one that will get you the grade" then why expect "pfft, why write my whole own paper/book when I can just copy what someone else got published?" to be beyond the pale when they're the academics?
As far as I'm aware, the cases being complained of are not a few words here and there that resemble words someone else wrote, but chunks of word-for-word copying. If that's not the thing you mean, then yes, extreme demands for rigour and so on.
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