Plagiarism (Redux)

A few months ago I mentioned plagiarism as an accidental phenomenon. The problem is that once in a while, it's a deliberate one.

I've tracked quite a few instances of students all round the world borrowing whole sentences and paragraphs from this blog for their TOK essays. Hey, if you want to cite my posts, go ahead. But don't use them without attribution, get hauled up for plagiarism, and suffer nasty consequences. Your teachers and professors can use Google too, you know.

Plagiarism

The funny thing about uncritical perception is that it leads to a kind of groupthink on the part of whole groups of students. If you have ten students, that's not so bad; if you have 400, that's going to be a large clump; and if you have 400 elite students (or socioculturally elite in a meritocratic plutocracy or plutocratic meritocracy) then that is a large clump with a huge potential societal impact.

There are several such novitiates in Atlantis. They practise the practice of reflection — that is, they reflect because they are told to do so, and most of the time, when they are illuminated, they just reflect the illumination and feel good about it.

The problem with this light-scattering effect is that it eventually looks a lot like plagiarism when it isn't really so. This is because the entire armamentarium of these novitiates has become standardised. They all wear the same kind of armour, use the same kinds of weapons, follow the same sort of drills. Then they customise these things for their own personal ambition and comfort, but as in most cases, customisation amounts to a 5% difference (or less) between morphologies.

My next paper will therefore be one on the morphology of mass customisation. It is a lot like that ubiquitous computer game, Spore.

Responses 000 (2009-2010)

Heh. Well, after yesterday's post, someone commented that if I finished the series, there might be difficulties. If you have a list of ten questions, with a large number of people all trying their hands at the same list, then after a while, the effect of plagiarism may occur. I say 'effect' because if you have a sufficiently large number of people thinking about the same problems, eventually some of them may duplicate the work of others. Of course, short commonalities are to be expected. The plagiarism effect arises not by coincidence, but by unconscious mental copying (the 'notebook in the head' effect).

True plagiarism, of course, is extremely difficult in this age of the Internet. It is just too easy to tap into a database and find matches. It is slightly more difficult to find paraphrases of ideas. But the student should be aware that plagiarism and breaching copyright are two different things. The latter subsists in making copies or derivatives of the form in which an idea is expressed; the former subsists in making copies or derivatives of the idea itself, without attribution.

It's considered very bad form, despite defences such as 'parallel evolution' and 'uncanny mystical coincidence'.

So in order to reduce the difficulty level, perhaps I shouldn't meditate at great length on the ideas I have concerning that list of questions...