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i hate that inaccessibility (in school, work, or public) is treated as a personal failure and not a feature of systematic hostility toward the poor, disabled and disenfranchised

so many resources are inaccessible to disabled students because there are no viable alternatives (i.e., no online office hours or exams, in-person help only, no extensions) not even because they can’t be done, but because no one is willing to change how things are done. work while you’re in school to support yourself? good luck accessing resources that are only available during work hours. can’t afford textbooks? work more at the expense of sleep or be born wealthy next time. don’t have time between classes to make it to office hours? just drop out, school isn’t for you! everything is like this and it’s maddening

a big lesson for me was learning that most things are not as fragile as I’d believed. missing a class, or turning in a bad assignment, won’t instantly destroy your professor’s opinion of you. accidentally saying something harsh won’t make your friend want to end the friendship. it takes work to repair these things - it takes effort and research and sometimes a sincere apology - but you can do that because they’re not irreparably broken. what you’ve worked to build, in academia and in relationships and in life, is stronger and more enduring that your mind may teach you to believe. don’t let imagined fragility lead you to giving up

i'm always a bit unsettled by disdain for intellectual or creative labor in leftist spaces. there's this commonly held belief that academics are a bunch of rich old white men, rather than a wide variety of people who are barely getting by. most lecturers in universities are adjuncts living paycheck to paycheck. authors make very little money as a general rule. most researchers are overworked and underpaid. and yet there's still this idea that academics are overcompensated to sit around and smoke cigars together while making shit up

The whole “scientists use big words on purpose to be exclusive” is such a bunch of anti-intellectual bullshit. Specific and concise language exists for a reason; you need the right words to convey the right meaning, and explaining stuff right is a hugely important part of science. Cultures that live around loads of snow have loads of words to describe different types of snow; cultures that live in deserts have loads of words to describe different types of sand. Complex language is needed for complex meaning.

people should stop acting that way about mathematics to mathematicians and start acting that way with business majors instead

this is why we need STEM-humanities solidarity

Republicans say 'fcuk your feelings' then whine that they are unlikable.

One frustrating thing about being a mathematician is that people who aren't into math heard that Einstein quote that's like "you haven't understood something unless you can explain it in layman's terms" and use it to mean "if it can't be explained to me in five minutes it's needlessly complicated, this person is a pretentious snob and academia is gatekeeping knowledge". And like everything in life, the matter of scientists not being able to/not caring to explain their work to people who aren't at the same level of expertise as them is a complex one that is worthy of being discussed, but here's the thing that you have to keep in mind if you haven't done math since high school:

the further you get into math, the more specialized your field becomes. You start working of puzzles that are small, but fit into a greater web of similar problems, like knitting a beautiful flower that's meant to be incorporated into a huge quilt. And all of math is build on top of each other, so you can't get to the most interesting, current math being discussed in the world without getting through the building blocks that are taught to you in elementary school, high school and the university.

You ask me to explain my thesis to you and I can tell you the title, but you won't know what the main words in it mean. And that's not because you are stupid, that's just because to learn that word you have to spend time learning a hundred others. I love math, it's my favourite thing in the universe and I always have time to talk about it, so if you want, we can sit down and I'll tell you everything you need to know to understand what I'm currently working on. You can ask me questions and I will reformulate, you can ask me to go over things again and I will oblige. With your permission, I will get a piece of paper and draw shapes and schemes to help us, but it won't take five minutes. It can't take just five minutes. That is a concession you will have to make if you truly want to learn.

(Unfortunately, I don't want to disclose the title of my thesis on tunglr dot hell, because it's super specific and I don't feel like doxxing myself. But I hope this resonates with some people. I work both in symplectic geometry and Riemannian geometry, and I have to say between the two Riemannian is a little bit easier to explain, because I can just talk about distances, but symplectic geometry or Lie groups... I'm afraid I just can't explain those in a sentence because they rely on people knowing what differentiation means, and that's not knowledge you necessarily retain if you work outside a stem field. Explaining that in a few sentences would eat up the whole five minutes).

the weird pervasive strawman I see where people decry the underwater-basketweaving uselessness of academic humanities work (and those who engage in it) specifically as some sort of serious societal drain becomes funnier and funnier as you learn about the actual scenario. in 2020, a little over 13,000 people received doctoral degrees in humanities/liberal arts areas in the US (humanities degrees were 8.9% of the total number awarded, down from 13.2% prior...the rest is stem). that's like 0.00000418% of the population. about 13% of the total population hold a degree beyond undergraduate, so if we apply the relative percentage we're looking at about 0.012% of the good American people max to populate this humanities boogeyman. what's more, people working in that (I hesitate to call it) sector make on average pretty close to the 56,310/yr national average salary (~30k/yr for a doctoral researcher, 100k-ish for a professor of 20 years). if anything, what the sphere in question produces is wildly outsized for the 'social investment' that it takes up—and that holds whether you're tradcath, into von mises, a poetry lover, a feminist, anti-carceral, AI-pilled, white buddhist, poststructuralist, or whatever. obviously the capital streams that uphold the institutions etc etc etc, but the well-worn accusation that humanities academia is parasitic on broad societal functioning by luring otherwise potentially hardworking people into an ivory fapping tower is ludicrous long prior to any refutation of the 'fapping' bit. the numbers just don't line up.

but of course the fear was never of that.

ily dropouts ily ppl getting their ged ily ppl who arent even getting a ged ily homeschooled ppl ily ppl who have to take breaks or leave the school system or who got held back i love everyone with a nonlinear or short school journey with my whole heart. btw.

The holy grail of searching through academic literature is coming across a string of publications that are like:

Here’s An Idea. Smith et al. 2016

Terrible Idea; a comment on Smith et al. 2016. Johnson 2016.

You’re Wrong Too; a response to Johnson 2016. Nelson 2016.

Guys Just Stop Fighting, None Of Us Know What’s Going On; a Review of the Current Literature. McBrien 2017.

Not even an exaggeration.

“If We Knew What We Were Doing, It Would Not be Called Research, Would It?”

tags via @jesterbutch

I teach a lot of undergrads these days. About 3 years ago, I started dedicating a full two hours early every semester to a lecture and discussion about the history of the concept of plagiarism, because I was so annoyed that my students were walking into my classroom with the ironclad belief that they weren't plagiarizing when they were. Sure, the university had some official plagiarism guidelines that they could hypothetically read in a code of conduct somewhere, but they didn't. All they had was a vague memory of some teacher in Grade 8 telling them 'don't copy and paste from wikipedia' and a little learning from experience afterwards.

My hypothesis (which I was delighted to find is shared by Brian Deer, the journalist who broke the Wakefield story and who was the source Illuminaughti plagiarized in the hbomberguy video) is that the rise of automatic plagiarism checkers meant that, in the minds of many students, the formerly more abstract concept of plagiarism ('passing someone else's work off as your own') became a more concrete concept operationalized by the plagiarism checker. Under this concept, a text is plagiarized if (and, implicitly, only if) it is detected as plagiarism by the plagiarism checker. I have spent many hours with students sobbing in my office after I told them that their essays were plagiarized, and they all say that they thought changing the words around was sufficient to make it not plagiarized. Maybe some of them were lying for sympathy, maybe they all were, but I see no reason to not take them at their word. They think that what they're doing is dubious (hence the shame) but they don't think it falls under what they take to be the definition of plagiarism - the thing they can face sanction from the university for. They need to have it pointed out to them that there has been plagiarism for a lot longer than there have been automatic 'plagiarism checkers' and that as their professor, I'm the only plagiarism checker they really need to be concerned about.

It's really easy for me to get frustrated about this. It's frustrating to me that the American public high school system (the source of the majority of my students) has failed to prepare them to think about information, facts, and where they come from. It's frustrating that students can't be arsed to read the university's code of conduct and that the only way I know they have is if I read it straight to their faces. It's very frustrating to see the written scholarly word, a medium to which I have dedicated no small part of my life, treated like it's not worth anything. I'm frustrated to know that most students are not in my class, or in the class of someone else prepared to teach this lesson, so they'll go through their whole lives thinking that an uncited light paraphrase is enough to be worthy of credit. I'm frustrated that people with such a lax attitude towards information are my fellow voters. I once read a real fucking academic essay that was submitted for grades that cited a long quote from Arthur Conan Doyle that, when I traced it, was actually a quote from a fucking TJLC blog. That one isn't frustrating, I guess, that's just funny. It's not all bad.

I'm glad for the hbomberguy video. I hope it will make it easier to convince my students in future. It's too bad he didn't go into the academic context, but it's not like he was short on things to talk about already.

But this is a more general problem than just the video essay context shows. If we're not careful, the very concept of plagiarism can get eroded. I'm not a linguistic prescriptivist, either! If enough people start taking this new concept as plagiarism, that will be what it becomes. I think a world in which that notion of plagiarism is the relevant one would be a worse world. Don't let people erode the idea of credit. You're going to want it later.

@venus-light I hope you don't mind me responding to you here. I have no intention of killing you! And if I went around killing people for this kind of misunderstanding, I'd have to kill a lot of my students, which I suspect my employer would not like. This is a really common problem. I'm glad the video helped, and I too hope you're not the only person it helps.

It sounds like you have a much better grasp on this now, but I want to take this opportunity to expand on the point a bit. I'm home sick from work today and not in a position to do anything but read and write, so I'm going to write a bit about plagiarism in university essays, and what I think is the best way for an undergraduate to avoid it. I've addressed it to you, because you're the one who replied, but this is really for any undergraduate who happens to be reading it.

The common pitfall that people fall into when thinking of plagiarism is thinking of it as the violation of some discrete set of rules. Thou shalt cite thy sources. Thou shalt not copy and paste. Thou shalt format thy citations according to the divine command of the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition). Rules like that. Trouble is, that approach can only ever be so useful. There's a lot of contextual variation when it comes to the question of how much paraphrasing is appropriate - for instance, an assignment that's just asking you to summarize a particular text will have a lot of paraphrasing from one source in it, and that's not a problem. What will serve you better than specific rules is a more general heuristic.

Let's zoom out a bit and ask a larger question: what's the point of a college humanities essay? Why do we professors make students do them? It's certainly not for our benefit - they're difficult and time-consuming to grade - and we certainly know that students don't like them. It's not because we want to be informed of facts, or even because we want to make sure you have command of facts. In-class testing is a way more effective way to establish whether or not you have command of relevant facts, and it's also a much easier method to grade. So, an essay is doing something different.

The point of a college essay is to give you an opportunity to practice joining a scholarly discussion. We don't just want to see that you've read parts of the existing discussion, we want you to try to add your own voice to it. That's why professors will often ask for a minimum number of different sources in an essay - if you have to synthesize many voices and build them into a coherent body of text, you'll probably end up offering some authorial insight of your own along the way (in a way, this is what Somerton could have been doing, had he been less lazy. There is a real skill in synthesizing and comparing disparate sources!). Your job in an essay is not merely to use sources, but to judge them. If you find two sources that conflict, you get to explain which you think is in the right (if either). If you think two seemingly different perspectives can be put into productive dialogue with each other, you get to say so. And if you think that everyone you've read is wrong, actually, you absolutely get to say so. That's how academics treat each other, and that's the point of an essay. We want you to try to be a historian or a philosopher or a literary critic for a few days (yes, a few. I know you think you can do it in one. Everyone thinks that and everyone's wrong).

Often when I tell students this they respond with a kind of deference - after all, they're not experts, but the people they're reading presumably are. Who are they to judge? And that's true! Students are definitionally not experts. We're not expecting you to be. If you miss something that anyone who's gone through grad school would know about, that's fine. We know that's going to happen. It takes years in grad school to achieve mastery of the canon. It's okay to not already have expertise when we're trying to help you achieve it! Deference to expertise makes sense in other contexts, like when you're writing for the public, but it's not what is being asked of you in a university essay. Gaining expertise requires you to practice thinking like an expert - not just learning, but judging. Reading broadly in the relevant subject is vital, of course, but it's only half the battle. The other half comes from you. The university essay is a safe space to try to figure out what the part that comes from you sounds like.

This may be a surprise to hear, but I actually still remember quite a lot of specific student papers years after I graded them. And that's because I remember what specific students brought to their papers. I got to see them learning that they could intervene in a discussion - that they could bring their own judgement to the table. That their voice could matter. This is one of the great privileges of teaching.

It may feel like we've come a long way from plagiarism, but we haven't. Because this is why plagiarism in education actually matters. In assigning you an essay, I am handing you a microphone and asking what you want to say. I'm not interested in hearing what someone else has said. If you only give me a bunch of stuff paraphrased from elsewhere, there's a real sense in which you just haven't done the assignment, because you haven't said anything. That's the same problem that the youtube plagiarists have - in their rush to talk as much as possible, they say nothing. What does Illuminaughti actually think about Wakefield? What insight does a self-proclaimed Internet Historian have about the tragic tale of Floyd Collins? Somerton mashes up a tonne of different people's writing, but the different people think different things - who does he think is right? We don't know. They said nothing, and then deceived us into watching them say nothing. What a waste of time.

That's the heuristic. That's the thing that will help you avoid plagiarism in the future. Be proud of what you have to say, and don't miss the opportunity to say it! Indicate clearly where you're drawing on other people, not just for their benefit, but for yours - so that it's absolutely clear that your words are your own. You have thoughts worth hearing about, and this is one of the few times in life where you can be sure that at least one person is going to hear about them. And if you can look at your essay and know that it says what you wanted to say, then you don't need to worry about plagiarism anymore. You'll know it's yours.

If you've read this far, thank you for indulging me in my little speech. I hope the end of the semester treats you well, and good luck with your future studies.

I think if any professor or teacher at any point in my life had just simply said point-blank "I'm not asking for the facts, I'm asking you to join the discussion," my early life writing academic papers would have gone a hell of a lot differently and been a lot more enjoyable.

I'm not even an academic, but this is also why I enjoy citing sources in my more serious essays, too. Enjoy, yes, because ideas come from people, and when I write I get to respond to those people, not just be a passive regurgitator of facts. As a writer, you have agency. You have your own opinion.

I love when a book I'm reading frequently cites its sources - especially when there's disagreements! (One of my favorite historians has been arguing with somebody else for over 20 years about obscure points of Roman law.) Knowledge isn't just some abstract canon, but a labor of love from enthusiastic nerds who bicker, build on, collect and question each other's ideas. Hiding your sources cuts you and your readers off from joining that discussion, and I find that frustrating and sad. As well as the plagiarism issue!

I wish my teachers had approached this the way that OP does. I think my classmates and I received an idea of knowledge that was static: this is how the world works, now memorize it, and repeat it for the exam. Knowledge was separated from the fascinated, fallible people just like us who build it. The problem was compounded by teachers who discouraged students from expressing their own opinions ("No back-talk"), and by a grading system that made many of us think we weren't smart enough to form opinions worth listening to.

I grew up thinking plagiarism was a problem because you weren't arranging words into new sentences, and thus skipping part of the assignment. And I still think learning to write is important. But the deeper issue is about ideas, and tracing where they come from, and finding your own voice. It astounds me that we can hear people's voices long after they are dead, thanks to writing. And it's even more wonderful that we can respond to them in turn, keeping alive the longest-running creative project in human history.

Who'd want to miss out on that?

should be able to leave kudos on scientific studies. i liked your paper dude keep at it

sorry, Dr. Dude

Dude et. al.

need y'all to know that most academics have publicly searchable email addresses and this not only makes their day but they can put nice emails in their giant packets for applying for jobs or tenure. "hi i read your paper for a class and it was very helpful, im at xyz college and the class is blah with professor blah" is sufficient and ENORMOUSLY helpful

Took me until about halfway through college before I realized “study” means “play with the material in a variety of ways until you understand it” and not just “read the assigned chapters and do the homework” and I think that probably should have been discussed at some point prior to that.

I love you people going into "useless" fields I love you classics majors I love you cultural studies majors I love you comparative literature majors I love you film studies majors I love you near eastern religions majors I love you Greek, Latin, and Hebrew majors I love you ethnic studies I love you people going into any and all small field that isn't considered lucrative in our rotting capitalist society please never stop keeping the sacred flame of knowledge for the sake of knowledge and understanding humanity and not merely for the sake of money alive

i love when people are Very invested in transhistorically excluding something like astrology or phrenology from the noble and enlightening category of ‘science’ but won’t extend this to things like nutrition and weight science, or evolutionary psychology, or like 90% of tech startups, or anything else with the current imprimatur of academic institutions and state-funded research orgs. the correct answer here is that science is not & never has been morally or intellectually infallible, and has been & still can be used to propagate falsehoods, harm people, & reinforce & justify existing inequities

like it might just be me but i think calling anyone’s degree “useless” and “a waste of time” is fucking rude at best. absolutely unnecessary and it’s not just because i’m an english major that’s a fucked up thing to say about any field. there’s a reason all of them exist and the world needs professionals from the fields western society deems “useless” more than ever.

knowledge for the sake of knowledge, learning to really critically think, and collecting that knowledge to share with others will never be useless or a waste of time