Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/11/ethics-expert-francesca-gino-already-under-fire-over-fabricated-data-accused-of-plagiarism.html
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Ethics expert, huh? I might be tempted to question that. Just a bit.
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Any fool can behave unethically by accident, but to really break the rules, you have to know them.
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It’s really strange to me that any professor, especially one at an R1 university, would not cite or attribute their sources. At this stage in an academic career, doing that should be second nature – even when writing a work for popular consumption.
I have a feeling that Professor Gino’s next move will be to say “look, I’m breaking the rules at work! I’m practising what I preach! I deserve praise, not criticism!”
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You go into the study of ethics thinking that you know the difference between right and wrong. But ethics isn’t about right or wrong, it’s about why one thing is right in one situation (or is it?) but not in another (or isn’t it?).
Before you know it, it’s all good as long as you find a way to get the fat man out of the cave without sacrificing your pawn to a streetcar in exchange for a rook who stole bread to feed his family of demographic anomalies in a lifeboat.
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It strikes me as a potentially troubling sign because it suggests that they’ve not faced enough consequences for not doing it(or having a minion do it for them) that they’ve developed a habit.
Obviously, in an ideal world, people would do the right thing regardless; but for the purposes of organizations of realistic size you get a lot of behavior generated by morally mediocre people who are neither especially motivated by goodness for its own sake, nor particularly depraved; but substantially shaped by incentives.
Doesn’t mean that every high-effort psychopath is an indictment of their environment; some people seem like they would rather work harder to break the rules even if abiding by them is actually easier and more beneficial even selfishly; but the behavior of the morally unspectacular absolutely reflects the incentives they’ve been given; and also the types of deceptive measures that the dedicated malefactors feel the need to employ.
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She says she found apparent plagiarism in the very first sentence of the first work she assessed, the 2016 chapter “Dishonesty explained: What leads moral people to act immorally.” The sentence—“The accounting scandals and the collapse of billion-dollar companies at the beginning of the 21st century have forever changed the business landscape”—is word for word the same as a passage in a 2010 paper by the University of Washington management researcher Elizabeth Umphress and colleagues.
I don’t want to defend Gino; I think that the data fraud is pretty damning. But just the same as with the Claudine Gay issue, I’m concerned that if you compare all the writings of one researcher with all the writings of all other researchers, you will pick up a significant amount of false plagiarism. There are definite stock phrases in academia (and elsewhere) and the bolded sentence above sure does sound like one of them.
I guess what I’m looking for is some kind of study which tells me how much overlap to expect when people are or are not plagiarizing.
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If HBomberGuy mentions you by name, that was probably too much plagiarising.
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Publish or perish, Rob. And that has been exacerbated by the constant attacks on academia from the right and center, the “adjunctification” of teaching, especially at the community college level, and the wide-spread funding problems for public unis, this is one of the few ways to make yourself stand out in your pursuit of a tenure track position (which are also under attack from the right, frankly). It doesn’t excuse plagiarism, but it helps explain how it’s happened in cases like this. If someone can have book hit the top ten best-sellers list, and get some name/brand recognition, then one can stand out a bit more on the job market…
TLDR, academia is falling apart.
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We’re at the cusp of one of these folks successfully rebranding to the failure. It’s a reasonable thing to do when you’re not in control. Neri Oxman didn’t even get to be the “protagonist” of her own plagiarism scandal—a fate worse than professional death.
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Yeah, sometimes there’s just only ways you can say a thing.
This happens when coding too, there’s only so many ways you can organize code to work and be readable. A simple script by 100 people will turn out maybe 8 different ways.
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Yes, in my previous institution, I was on the academic integrity committee. Specifically, I was on it because they needed someone who coded and the lit faculty who usually made up the committee didn’t feel qualified to evaluate what counted as plagiarism. I’ve seen a broad range of accusations from “some similarities but insufficient evidence” to “put name at the top and changed one variable name from x to pizza”.
To continue on the coding theme, what I’m worried about is something broadly similar to collisions in a hash table or the birthday problem in math. There are 365 days (neglecting leap year) possible for birthdays, but when you have a class of around 23 people there is over a 50% chance that two students will have the same birthday. Now, there are probably a pretty large number of ways of saying the content of the sentence I bolded. (Maybe 1000s, I don’t know.) But there are also a large number of people writing on this topic. Again, maybe thousands of faculty and millions of undergrads. If you check every one of these sentences against that whole corpus, the probabilities will look a lot different from checking them one at a time.
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Ah, you see the trick is to put the philosophical zombie in the boat with the philosophical dog, row across the river, leave the dog on the other side, come back with the zombie, load Russell’s teapot in with the zombie, use the teapot to lure the fat man out of the cave, then throw the zombie in front of the streetcar.
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The boat is the Ship of Theseus yes?
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Okay, now I’m severely tempted to use this as an AI prompt.
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Lifeboat of Theseus, I think.
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