Who cares about plagiarism?(worksinprogress.co) |
Who cares about plagiarism?(worksinprogress.co) |
Not only that, reproducibility is core to research. Without having detailed records of where ideas are originating (i.e., citations) research is much less reproducible.
There are actually many examples of papers getting accepted because the authors claim something new by using new terminology, but ignore all prior work in the field. The reviewers are not experts in that subfield, so they accept the paper without realizing it is not novel.
Maybe it once was but for the vast majority of people who enter academia the enter point is to increase their take home pay throughout their life.
Academia isnt some noble endeavor but a desperate game that people play in an attempt to win enough money that they can comfortably live their meager lives and hopefully raise their children to have better lives than they had.
Until economic necessity is decoupled from participating in the academic process the idea that academia serves some kind of abstract goal like the persuit of knowledge will remain an elaborate lie that people tell themselves to justify their life choices regarding academia.
I really don't get the point the article is trying to make. Copying other's ideas and introductions and methods is practically a core tenet of science and every paper out there does it. No one is discouraging you from copying anyone else's articles (publishers would be another topic), they're just asking for a citation. Is a citation so hard ?
If you claim that requiring citations is not "open" then practically no software license is "open".
A bad citation is viewed as some sort of academic crime. Bad content -- if actually judged -- is largely ignored.
Perhaps I'm just scarred from my student days when I put a superscript at the end of the wrong sentence, which left the following sentence uncited gasp. A big deal was made of this that I was plagiarizing the material. They were also upset that I wasn't visibly concerned enough about this high crime and that I only viewed it as a typo. Seriously, I added the superscript one sentence early. There was never any feedback on the work itself.
It is essentially in agreement with your position here.
Seriously, the world doesn't need papers for the sake of papers. It needs useful information and confirmation that information published is useful. Or if not directly useful, at least accurate as documenting something.
Maybe you are thinking that the PhD mill is itself problematic, but there comes a point where saying "if things were different, this would not be a problem" becomes a way to avoid the issue.
The reason why no one does replication studies is because no one offers grants to fund replication studies. If you want replication studies, lobby to pay for them at the federal level, because that's where everyone's grants come from. If that money comes available, you'll have as many replications studies as you could dream of.
This is of course harder in other media.
Paul Mccartney said during one interview that when he wrote the melody of "Yesterday", he wasn't sure if it was his or he overheard it somewhere, so he spent 2 weeks playing it to various people. Consider the fact that Yesterday's melody is fairly elaborate and it was the 60s. Tens of millions of songs were written since. The conventional 3 minute song format simply ran out of melodies. So either songs need to adopt more complex approach of Bohemian Rhapsody (unlikely) or plagiarism is absolutely inevitable.
No wait. I hate that. Why would you think people want that? Why do we build crap like that? Why do we tolerate it? This is our community, we are the ones who build it.
Let’s take back control and crush crappy behavior like that.
the problem is that the community is a group of many individual persons, ultimately it is the individual persons who by actively knowing the 'science' embody science itself.
the science is not exclusive to any individual or group (though nowadays, "important" science is really restricted because nobody wants the Chinese copying from them).
As I see it, the gist of the whole issue is establishing property rights over pieces of culture.
Why would anybody do this? well it seems to me that the biggest driver is that if things are exclusively owned, then they can be traded in some kind of marketplace.
The problem with this attitude is that culture (e.g. science) is not something that can be exclusively owned (a problem shared by digital things).
IMO, it all comes down to people wanting to be paid (with royalties and/or recognition) for what they did a long time ago.
with a practical intent, I think that the question which needs an answer is how can we have a marketplace to trade things which are not exclusively owned?
or maybe we should reconsider the general practice of continuing to reward people for things they already did?
10% of productive people create 90% of everything. The 90% unproductive people engage in ideology, politics, defamation and rationalize why the output is actually theirs. They are the public face of the stolen economic or intellectual output.
As a productive person, just say "no"!
There is no doubt that "plagiarism" can be ambiguous ("self-plagiarism??") and copying with modification can be justified, but there are much more blatant examples that I think clearly cause harm.
That being said, I think there is the broader issue of discoverability. As a practical matter, it's very convenient, if I have a paper on X, that I can look at the citations and get good links to resources on Y. This isn't really a matter of making the author of this or that paper happy either, it's about giving the reader some useful information.
And I just don't see how to replicate that without citations.
That's not to say the social science style (Davis, 1953) isn't obnoxious, though - there it really seems (Johnson, 2010) to be more about name-dropping the big guys (Smith, 2007), than about putting a small unobtrusive number in a superscript.
What I would never do, or never use, are restrictive/copyleft licensing terms. There don't begin to be enough hours in the day to spend even one second arguing about copyright with geeks. You get dirty, and the pigs like it, etc.
Maybe just consider them a form of closed-source (where you can look at the source) instead of raging about them?
Of course, everyone builds on the work of others. The problem with plagiarism is that an author builds on the work of others without citing.
However, with computers and the data we have, I think we are pretty close to the point where a computer program could quickly do similarity searches and automatically generate all the citations.
A lot of this technology already exists with plagiarism detectors which can detect uncited sources. We just have to make it add those sources as citation.
It could kind of be like auto format for scientific papers. The analogy would be like instead of getting into a discussion about formatting and tabs vs spaces on every pull request, we just have an auto format that runs for every pull request, and removes that contention
We might be able to do the same with citations and make plagiarism a thing of the past.
I think the issue is "attribution" vs "you're supposed to be original."
It's funny, because of course in law, literally only the first thing matters and the second is completely unnecessary and not part of the equation -- when it comes to adjudicating real life matters. I find that this stretches over to the academic work I do and how I grade it.
I generally try to do something like -- look, show me via writing (and frequently other media, screenshots, whatever) that you've done work in looking at this stuff. But I don't really need or expect you to "come up with something new." -- mostly because, what could "new" possibly mean here?
It was something which I had done many, many times myself - where I'd just copy/paste boilerplate stuff from my older reports or papers, into my new papers.
A couple of years after graduation, I read articles about students getting caught and expelled for self-plagiarism in things like home exams.
However, I found this passage wrong-headed:
> “Academic plagiarism norms”, Frye writes, “are primarily an inefficient and illegitimate form of extra-legal academic rent-seeking that should be ignored.” And although he doesn’t quite call those who disagree with him “wussies and pussies”, he does disparagingly refer to the “plagiarism police”, which includes anyone who tries to identify academic plagiarism and somehow punish the plagiarist.
I completely disagree. I am a non-academic who takes published academic work seriously. My number one discovery mechanism for new knowledge is not arbitrary web searches or the even a library catalogue, but citations. A strong norm against plagiarism in academia (where everyone really is standing on the shoulders of giants) is essential for academic knowledge to be available among the public, not to be cloistered away, only available to a learned elite.
Academic research already presents so many accessibility barriers to the public (stiff & boring writing, copious jargon/symbols, excessive abstraction, lack of data for reproducibility, false published conclusions and even publisher paywalls to name a few), I'd hate to see academia create another by normalizing plagiarism.
If many papers state the same thing and don't cite each other, a reader could reasonably conclude that thing must be true, as so many people have independently verified/discovered it.
The well of knowledge on Wikipedia, and the Internet as a whole, is forever poisoned due to journalists not consistently citing sources.
You don't just got "only 12 tones" but also tone length, pauses, melody length, etc.
Regarding the permutations - absolute majority of randomly generated melodies will sound like shit, complete gibberish. Like think worse than impro jazz. So when you only leave the "useful" ones, that number is drastically smaller.
http://spiderrobinson.com/melancholyelephants.html
IMO we're already about where this story projects we'd end up surprisingly fast under that set of circumstances, and are just kinda in denial about it.
Yeah yeah the "only so many notes in music" argument.
As a hobbyist songwriter I'm surprised you would say this knowing what semi-tones are, as well as how identical phrases can be entirely different melodies when the backing chords are taken into account.
Said so smugly, too
You are literally describing the technique by which Western polyphony developed new melodies!
For centuries composers took the exact intervals of a pre-existing popular melody, had one singer sing it at a glacial pace, then had one or more other singers fill in the gaps with new sprightly melodies.
For example, consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missa_L%27homme_arm%C3%A9
Same title, same exact super-slow melody (a.k.a. cantus firmus), yet no plagiarism in the sense you're using it.
Josquin's mensural canon[1] flies out of neverminder's nostril at the last possible moment:
Go go go!
Goooooo!
Go Go!
neverminder sneezes
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missa_L%27homme_arm%C3%A9_supe...
I believe the GGP meant to refer to “microtones,” which are frequencies that don’t fall into the Twelve Tone Equal Temperament tuning system. These are commonly used in non-western music (Indian music is a typical example), and occasionally in some western music styles (blues, some jazz, some sub-genres of rock, maybe), but you’re not going to find microtones in most western music.
The use of microtones would greatly expand the set of possible melodies, but those melodies would also sound very weird to someone who has grown up listening to western music. Also, these legal cases are not decided by precisely comparing the relative frequencies of notes in two different melodies.
Relating all this to the article, I personally feel like music is not a good parallel for the topic of academic plagiarism since the idea is the whole point of academic papers, whereas the point of music is harder to pin down, but it’s certainly not only to expand the set of melodies and chords used in songs.
Anyways, for more on music theory, I’d suggest Adam Neely’s YouTube channel [2].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament
[2] such as this video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ghUs-84NAAU
It's a bit odd from my perspective
People from all cultures can and do use notes from outside those twelve tones in music. In western music, sometimes you’ll notice (check out King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard[1]), and sometimes you probably won’t (that “raspiness” in blues music is usually because they’re singing/playing a note slightly “out of tune” aka “microtonally”).
Music and “what sounds good” is a cultural construct, and I’d encourage you to check out music from around the world as well experimental microtonal artists if you’re interested in hearing what happens when you aren’t tied to the idea of twelve notes in an octave.
I wish more people were exposed to a wider variety of types and patterns in music, there's a lot of great sounding music out there which breaks the usual mold played on radio stations
The 12 tone standard didn't just come out of nowhere, it is dominant for a reason. It developed throughout the entire existence of humanity. Think about it, currently the scientific consensus is that singing actually came before speaking. It's those 12 tones that create the best sounding melodies and harmonies. The greatest composers of all time used them. Maybe you're a guy who likes impro jazz (which coincidentally uses micro tones), but most people don't.
12 is the simplest scale whose intervals match the harmonic sequence. It's a technology.
It’s also worth noting that modern 12-TET is not the series of whole number ratios that someone might expect from basing it off a harmonic series [1]. It’s an approximation based off a logarithmic scale. 12 Tone Just (or “Pure”) Intonation sounds pretty weird, and in my opinion, bad. If people had been making music with 12 Tone Just Intonation for the last millennium, maybe it would sound good to me!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12_equal_temperament#Just_inte...
To make just temperament sound "good" even relative to the ears of another time period, probably required playing music written for that particular tuning.
As a double bassist, playing pitches repeatably enough to claim any specific temperament would be a lifelong challenge, if it's even attainable. Most of the time, musicians don't think about temperaments. We try to play in tune and sound good.
Side note: yes, I love love jazz in all its forms ^^
>I believe the GGP meant to refer to “microtones,” which are frequencies that don’t fall into the Twelve Tone Equal Temperament tuning system. These are commonly used in non-western music (Indian music is a typical example), and occasionally in some western music styles (blues, some jazz, some sub-genres of rock, maybe), but you’re not going to find microtones in most western music.