Personal essays
Maslow’s hierarchy of things to worry about
A stack of books
I bought a book on Friday that I don’t plan to read for months.
It’s the “plan” part of that sentence that’s different for me.
I love books and bookstores and often buy physical or eBooks that sit unread next to my bed, in the living room, or on my iPad or Kindle. There are even audio books that sit unlistened to in Audible or elsewhere.
But those are books that I bought with the intention of reading - I just haven’t taken the time to do so.
After last week’s essay a friend wrote me that he thought some of my ideas sounded a bit like something from the original book about keeping a Bullet Journal so I went to the library and borrowed it along with a mystery.
It turned out I had already listened to the mystery so that went back in my return pile, and the bullet journal technique was too complicated for me so about halfway through I shut it and put it in the return pile.
I could see where my friend had thought of an overlap between my idea and the Bullet Journal - I think it’s natural for ideas to overlap without one coming from the other.
When the time was right for Calculus, both Newton and Liebniz came up with some of the same ideas from very different points of view.
Generally, if someone comes up with the same thing that I’m working on, I celebrate it.
If they got it by copying me, not so much.
The unread book
So I have this book I bought that I’m not going to read for a while.
I’m writing a book on the same topic so I’ll read up on the subject matter and write a lot of code - but I’m not going to read the book yet.
I want to make sure that I don’t borrow from it by mistake. Almost as importantly, I want to make sure no one thinks I’ve borrowed from it.
Will there be overlaps? Certainly.
I once wrote a technical book and just to be silly wrote a sonnet in the middle named something like, “An Ode to a Unit Test.”
Months later someone sent me a picture they took of a slide from someone’s presentation at a conference and there was my poem.
The presenter didn’t credit me - they presented it as their own and got a big laugh from the room.
That bothers me a lot.
When you present someone’s work as your own without any attribution - that’s wrong.
Who’s hurt
I worry about the coming grey areas.
Can we ask ChatGPT for help and not cite it or the sources it used? How will we know all of the sources it used?
People copy from Wikipedia all the time. It feels large and anonymous - is anyone hurt?
Much of the material there is covered by copyright.
But beyond the legal standard - don’t present someone else’s work as your own.
Credit them.
In the case that you can’t remember where you saw it - at least acknowledge that you saw the ideas somewhere else.
Sometimes when you have a short quote or a paraphrase in your head you forget to credit the source. It’s lazy, it’s wrong, it’s likely not malicious. But when you take the time to reproduce a direct quote…
Here’s a case and I don’t remember the actual source.
I read a paragraph somewhere that seemed familiar to me. It was talking about how the Reagan administration had classified Ketchup as a vegetable. But the phrasing sounded familiar. I had actually clipped the original article from the Boston Phoenix earlier that month since I loved the rhythm of the language used.
I can’t tell you the name of the publication that stole the paragraph (I think I know who it was but that would be irresponsible of me) but I wrote to them and the Phoenix with copies of the original and the stolen paragraph.
It wasn’t a big deal - but the second publication had liked the paragraph enough to use it. Credit the first publication. More importantly, credit the author of the piece.
It was like seeing my poem up on the screen.
It turns out, real people write and edit Wikipedia articles. If you like their work enough to use it, credit it.
Why now
So why is this bug up my butt right now?
“Daniel,” you say, “there’s no need to be vulgar.”
Sure.
Plagiarism is in the news.
It’s not in the news because it offends the person bringing the charges. It’s in the news because it’s a weapon that can be used to bring down someone you want brought down for other reasons.
And the person bringing the charges? His wife has been shown to copy phrases and paragraphs from the Wikipedia and is being accused of plagiarism as well. She actually sat down and copied from another source and presented the material as her own.
So, as the Scottish say, “I just can’t be arsed about this.”
(If you’re keeping score - that’s “butt” and “arsed” in the same section.)
I have a mantra that I’ve mentioned here before: if it bothers you when their side does it, it should bother you when your side does it. And, if it doesn’t bother you when your side does it, then it shouldn’t bother you when their side does.
I know that plagiarism is serious for a Harvard president and an MIT professor. Whether real or metaphorical, you take an oath to behave in certain ways when you become a member of a university community.
I should be offended by these blows against academic integrity.
But right now I’m just not.
I’m bothered by the six mass shootings we’ve already had in 2024 in the US.
I’m concerned that, according to the CDC, US COVID deaths are up 12.5% to 3.6% of all deaths.
I’m really worried that, according to a Washington Post poll last week, “More than 7 in 10 Republicans say that too much is being made of the attack and that it is ‘time to move on.’”
Sure, it bothers me when an academic presents original work without the appropriate citations - but it bothers me more that elected public servants who take an oath to support and defend the constitution don’t feel bound by that.
It’s kind of a Maslow’s hierarchy of things to be bothered by. Once my democracy is stable and our government returns to some sort of normalcy, I’ll worry about plagiarism at Harvard and MIT.
Essay from Dim Sum Thinking Newsletter 198. Read the rest of the Newsletter or subscribe