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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   28676 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 15, 2024

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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):

“I had done no biking all summer,” Ackman now admits. Still, he went out at a very fast clip, his hypercompetitive instincts kicking in. As he and Loeb approached Montauk, Loeb texted his friends, who rode out to meet them from the opposite direction. The etiquette would have been for Ackman and Loeb to slow down and greet the other riders, but Ackman just blew by at top speed. The others fell in behind, at first struggling to keep up with the alpha leader. But soon enough Ackman faltered—at Mile 32, Ackman recalls—and fell way behind the others. He was clearly “bonking,” as they say in the cycling world, which is what happens when a rider is dehydrated and his energy stores are depleted.

While everyone else rode back to Loeb’s East Hampton mansion, one of Loeb’s friends, David “Tiger” Williams, a respected cyclist and trader, painstakingly guided Ackman, who by then could barely pedal and was letting out primal screams of pain from the cramps in his legs, back to Bridgehampton. “I was in unbelievable pain,” Ackman recalls. As the other riders noted, it was really rather ridiculous for him to have gone out so fast, trying to lead the pack, considering his lack of training. Why not acknowledge your limits and set a pace you could maintain? As one rider notes, “I’ve never had an experience where someone has gone from being so aggressive on a bike to being so hopelessly unable to even turn the pedals…. His mind wrote a check that his body couldn’t cash.”

Nor was Ackman particularly gracious about the incident afterward, not bothering to answer e-mails of concern and support from others in the group until months later.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Well then Lakers fans would naturally go through every other team's games

Joke's on them, there is effectively no other team in academia.

Ackman

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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