On Plagiarism and its Perpetrators
Oct 5, 2021 “People steal ideas and present them as their own. What's up with that?”#philosophy #rants #opinion
As a software developer, hardware engineer, and systems architect my reputation, credibility, and even future employment rely on demonstrating that I know what the I’m doing. When someone takes something they know someone else created and then presents it as their own, they lose any respect in my book.
Author’s Note: A previous version of this post included more colorful language and a harsher tone. I have edited this post to use less of both. The factual accuracy of this article is unaffected and my positions are unchanged: plagiarism sucks. (Oct. 11, 2021)
As an online tech persona, you live and die by your street cred. You put
in the work and receive the appropriate clout and credibility. So when you’re
outed as a dilettante, or worse a skiddie, you lose all that sweet 1337
cred from your fake internet friends peers.
Which leads into the point of this post… Plagiarism.
It costs nothing, nil, nada to insert a footnote in a research paper or a
comment in code to give someone else (e.g., StackOverflow) credit. So why don’t
people just do it? You are free to use people’s extremely clever ideas, and
present your improvements, commentary, explanation, or polish on top of that
as long as you include your references. It takes 10 seconds to properly cite
others' work with modern software like Zotero or EasyBib, but somehow people
still avoid giving others credit. It’s easier than ever to catch plagiarists
with a search engine or software like MOSS. But for some inexplicable reason
people still do it! It’s perfectly acceptable to use other people’s
insightful or innovative ideas in your work, but you have to give them credit.
In fact, one of the GOAT cryptographers Bruce Schneier does this on a regular basis. Is he any less of a mathematician or person because of it? No, because he cites his sources.
Cite Your Sources, Stupid
Given the cost-benefit tradeoff of plagiarism vs. citation, it makes zero sense to plagiarize. You should always reference your sources, even if you don’t end up using them.
I thought plagiarism and scammers were a relatively rare phenomenon until I stumbled upon the Coffeezilla channel on YouTube. Turns out it’s pretty darn common today. The nonsense scammers and fake gurus pull is pretty bad. These people are so self-unaware that it’s disheartening.
One of the most egregious scam artists in the tech field is Siraj Raval – who rips off people’s work in AI and Machine Learning and presents it as his own. Siraj Raval presents himself as an expert in AI and even sells courses with copypasta’d content from others. If he has to steal content from others in a field that’s brimming with literature and new ideas, then maybe he isn’t quite the big-brained expert he purports to be?
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I prefer for my instructors and “experts” to
actually know what they’re talking about; it is not helpful for them
regurgitate Wikipedia or arXiv – I can read that on my own. Notice how Siraj
not only misrepresents the work of others as his own, but also lies about the
small class size of his courses a.k.a. fraud. I hope that he has learned a
lesson, but realize that he probably hasn’t. Perhaps the worst part of this saga
isn’t Siraj’s attempted failed redemption arc, but that
more fakers will follow him.
Closer to home, there apparently is a serious problem with plagiarism in software and tech. It turns out that plagiarism is a big problem with coding in college and takes place regularly, even at the prestigious “best universities” in the world. Notably, Computer Science (read: the dumb name the US uses for “programming”) is a particularly bad offender in the academia. Some have speculated this is because the coding is filled with the “put up or shut up” mentality and that computers are a very ruthless reality check against wrong ideas. And so when students can’t meet the minimum threshold of correctness, they resort to cheating (source citing Barrett & Cox (2005) and Roberts (2002), p. 3 of PDF).
I tend to agree with this explanation. Too bad for students that the easy way
out is the wrong way. It’s perfectly acceptable to ask an instructor for help or
to admit you don’t know something on your problem sets. But that doesn’t mean you can
memcpy(3)
someone’s code and say it’s yours.
A Case Study
Switching to a related topic, let’s talk about someone who was once upon a time my good friend. We’ll call him Bob. Obviously, he plagiarized something, or he wouldn’t be in this post.
I had known Bob wasn’t the brightest engineer, but didn’t know he wasn’t quite up to snuff. I had plenty of discussions with Bob on technical topics previously, but didn’t know he BS’d (hah! get it?) his way through those conversations and school. Earlier this year I learned from numerous people close to the matter (where n ≥ 5) that Bob had plagiarized an introductory level lab for his major.
In this course, he was going behind his classmates' backs after they left the
lab and took copies of their notes and lab bench data, apparently to use on his
own lab report. He didn’t get any
permission to do so, and then later misrepresented the situation as “oh we were
lab partners.” How did he get caught? He left a flash drive – conveniently
named “Bob’s Drive” – containing all of his classmates' data and work out
in the open. Fortunately he couldn’t feign denial that the flash drive was his,
because there was a document resume.pdf
with his name, home address, and other
personal information in the root of the drive.
But that’s not what makes me question his honesty or character. The following exchange he had with my friend is what turned me against plagiarists. Bob was soldering a PCB in a shared workspace one day (I was doing a different task in the same area) and my friend was watching him struggle. My friend asked Bob something to the spirit of, “do you know what you’re doing? I can help you out.” Bob the plagiarist responded,
“I have a degree in this. I think I know what I’m doing.”
Excuse me, Bob?
Someone who I know for a fact stole and plagiarized a not-insignificant amount of work for their undergrad degree was referring to the same degree as proof of his competence. Amazing. If I graduated from the same place as Bob, then maybe college really was a waste of time and money.
It turns out that Bob had other issues too: he had triggered three separate theft and fraud audits at a previous employer. The justification for not firing him was that “it’s hard” to fire someone who works for the government. Dang it, bureaucracy.
There is more, but I don’t want to get sued (even with proof for everything written). If there’s something I dislike more than plagiarists, it’s definitely lawyers and frivolous litigation. Turns out I’m just like others in my field.
Other Thoughts
Back on topic, it turns out that people who cheat on one thing are likely to cheat on other things. So I posit this: plagiarism is an extremely useful positive leading indicator of someone’s moral character. If they’re cheating on something as meaningless or easy as words, then they likely cheat on more important things as well. As the saying goes: when there’s smoke, there’s fire. So it’s fairly predictable that Siraj and Bob aren’t stand-up guys.
To reinforce my point, here is a non-exhaustive list of people of questionable morals that, surprise (!!!), have also stolen the work of others as their own:
- Albert Silver of Chessbase, who is now getting sued because he can’t be bothered to follow Stockfish’s license (GPLv3). NB: Chess is my current hobby, so there will probably be a blog post on this incident in the future.
- Joseph Biden, the current President of the United States
- David Mikkelson, cofounder of Snopes
- Robert Caslen, former President of the University of South Carolina
Closing
Don’t plagiarize others. The only way to git gud is to put in the time and actually do the damn work yourself. When you plagiarize you’re presenting other’s thoughts as your own, so you didn’t develop your thoughts, but regurgitated someone else’s. Thus the plagiarist’s mind is devoid of original thought – and functionally worthless.
And that’s the reason why I’m not a useless grad that can’t even program. I put in the work and time and that’s the only reason I know things. I’ve written horrendously ugly code, but I’m writing it incrementally better, one line at a time, for more than a decade now.
Because he plagiarized, Bob wasn’t as technically skilled as a degree with engineering in the name would lead one to believe. Because they cribbed work, Bob and Siraj didn’t have the skills they present they would have. Sorry boys, but until you put the effort and time in, you just won’t get it.
Don’t plagiarize; do the work yourself, or you will forever be a charlatan.