The Punishable Perils of Plagiarism

As we've seen before (in a case in which a professor discovered a massive collective case of cheating), academic dishonesty is a serious and growing problem. What most cheaters don't always realize, however (especially those who engage in plagiarism), is the paradoxical nature of cheating: those who need to do it are usually not clever enough to know how to do it well enough to get away with it, and those who could get away with it are smart enough not to need to do it...

To paraphrase something I read in a fascinating article on anosognosia a couple of years ago: if you're too stupid to cheat, you're probably too stupid to know you're too stupid to cheat... The irony, of course, is that if you think you're clever enough to get away with it, you probably don't belong to the clever category...

Now, while the following video disavows the existence of our agency, those of us who, willingly or unwillingly, work for the Department of Plagiarism Investigation are familiar with lots of different versions and variations of cheating, and the disadvantage of any one cheater is that he/she is competing against the accumulated knowledge our agency has collected since its inception a long, long time ago...

Here is just a small sample of the many ways (both laughable and frustrating) in which students think they can get away with plagiarized work:

Of course, we can't divulge all the methods we have for catching instances of plagiarism, but even if you don't care about education itself or the value of honest work, it's still in your own self-interest not to cheat because if you get caught... well, let's not go there...

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The Examined Life

While defending himself against his accusers (at least in Plato's Apology), Socrates uttered a sentence that has captured the essence of philosophy and that has reverberated through the centuries: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

More than two thousand years later, now that we live in a society that's technologically advanced and that has benefited from the lessons learned through science and history, is there any need to question our most basic presuppositions, to wonder whether we are on the path to achieving wisdom, to ask whether we are worthy human beings, to remove the mask of superficiality and peer into the depths of our being? You'd better believe it!

And to prove it, today we are showcasing the documentary The Examined Life, which consists of a few sections in which a bunch of philosophers (people like Cornel West, Peter Singer, Martha Nussbaum, Slavoj Zizek and others) talk for a few minutes about various issues that we may normally take for granted as settled. And as you'll see, these short discussions will make it painfully obvious that things aren't nearly as neat and settled as we tend to assume. And once the philosophical gadfly bites you, even though you might feel uncomfortable, you'll be better off than you were before since now at least you have some kind of idea about what's really going on. And it is in that realization and doubt that the seed of wisdom can be planted. The question then becomes whether you'll help cultivate it and grow...

We are featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures, born between urine and feces, whose body will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us.

Awesome :)

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Blowing the Whistle on Whistleblowers

Whistleblowing and information leaks have been spearheading news headlines recently. Among the highest profile cases in America we've had Bradley Manning and, most recently, Edward Snowden. Many have jumped on the character assassination wagon, calling them traitors, cowards, and a lot of other things, even calling for their heads!, all of which tends to distract from the more pressing issue: the information leaked, what it tells us about the sources that were trying to keep it secret, and the implications going forward.

Directly or indirectly, both men did work for the government, so a case could potentially be made that they betrayed our government. Though I disagree with that position, I'm willing to grant it for the sake of argument. What they did not betray, however, is their country. They saw that the government was violating human rights, the constitution and the principles upon we always claim our nation was founded, and they decided to stand up to power so that we could rescue our country back from the forces that want to corrupt it for their own purposes. These men are American and moral heroes. Few have the courage to stand up and risk so much when it would be so much easier to just stay silent and look the other way, and now, in their time of need, we ought to stand by them and support them.

Yes, the information they revealed is shocking and damaging to our reputation, no doubt, but our reputation ought to be based who we are, not on what we hide. And claims regarding national security, at least in these two cases, have been completely fabricated or at least blown way out of proportion. Unlike the previous administration, which actually outed individual secret agents and put their lives at real risk (all in the name of politics, I might add), Manning and Snowden have leaked information about highly questionable programs and practices that have been institutionalized without having gone through the proper checks and balances (you know, pesky little things like the Constitution and such)...

But of course, how you feel about and refer to these folks depends on where you're coming from, as the hilarious Samantha Bee beautifully and succinctly shows:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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And just to give you a taste of the backward twilight zone world we seem to be living in, here's an example of those in (financial) power trying to silence those who report on their corruption by trying to turn the law on them! (and apparently without noticing the irony and contradiction):

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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Ok, this is going to sound horrible, so be warned, but was it deliberate that the public relations spokesperson sort of looks like a piggy, to make it look like they sympathize with the plight of animals, or was it just an unfortunate and ironic coincidence?

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Buy Starschmucks, Attack God?

Apparently evangelical Christian and right-wing conservative 'historian' David Barton and I have something in common: we kind of hate Starschmucks. Our reasons, however, differ. My antagonism is based on the condescending pretentiousness of the brand and many of its 'baristas,' and on the fact they have driven many humble mom-n-pop coffee shops into the ground. Barton's problem, however, is that StarBucks believes in marriage equality.

It's typical of right-wing conservative fundamentalist Christians like Barton to be obsessed with questions of sexuality (especially other people's) while ignoring questions of poverty, social justice and loving our neighbors. After all, given everything Jesus said about homosexuality... oh wait, he never said a word about it! He only wasted his time trying to make people kinder and more accepting and forgiving of others...

In any case, while the following analysis by The Young Turks commits a bunch of logical mistakes of its own, they do manage to drive home the point regarding the arbitrary double-standard on which most religion-based objections to homosexuality are based and what the consequences of taking their own reasoning seriously entails...

And I've never understood this, but how exactly do beards have corners???

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Hunters Are Pussies

There, I said it. You have probably seen what hunters like to do, right? Once they've killed some "game," they like to take pictures of themselves next to the dead carcass before mounting it as a trophy on their walls for the world to see and admire. Future generations are going to think of us the way we think today about slave owners: as a bunch of ignorant assholes...

But here's the thing: this wasn't a fair fight. In fact, it wasn't a fight at all. The poor animal got ambushed and killed before it could have any time to protect itself, and the wimpy but boastful "predator" was hundreds of yards away, taking comfortable advantage of a weapon that makes him feel like a "man" while simultaneously negating that manhood by placing him completely outside of any real danger and discomfort.

And as Stephen Colbert reports, to add insult to injury, they're also getting lazier...

The Colbert Report
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If you want to hunt and be a real man, leave your rifle behind, grab a couple of knives and go fight the beast head-on. Let the best fighter win...

But let's keep it real, here's what's probably going to happen:

Q.E.D.

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Stephen Colbert - The Word: Medical Leave

As political philosopher Michael Sandel has argued in the past (as in this video and in this article from The Atlantic), when we turn from a market economy to a market society, we have taken a decidedly wrong turn... Instead of valuing people as persons with dignity and worthy of respect and consideration, with goals and projects that may have meaningful, intrinsic, emotional or educational value, we start to see everything (and everyone) around us through money-colored filters, and valuing them only in terms of their economic value: how much money they can contribute to our own financial goals or how much money they're going to cost us; and in the process we rob them of their personhood and humanity.

Stephen Colbert reports on some instances of this downward trend as it applies to hospitals and health-care providers...

The Colbert Report
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And what does it say about the insane cost of our healthcare system that deporting people overseas on a private plane is cheaper than just taking care of their injuries???

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Viktor Frankl on Those Who Survived The Holocaust and Those Who Did Not

I just finished reading Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. I'm not sure anyone can read that book without getting knots in one's throat and/or getting teary-eyed...

The book isn't so much an account of events that took place during the Holocaust, but of the individual, subjective experiences of those who were sent to concentration camps, what they had to endure, what happened to their minds and bodies, and the life-or-death dilemmas they had to confront on a daily basis. This is an account written by a particularly thoughtful, honest and courageous psychologist who was able to interpret such experiences in light of larger issues about humanity in general.

The following is just one chilling example of the kind of insight and epiphany that makes this book one everyone ought to read:

On the average, only those prisoners could keep alive who, after years of trekking from camp to camp, had lost all scruples in their fight for existence; they were prepared to use every means, honest and otherwise, even brutal force, theft, and betrayal of their friends, in order to save themselves. We who have come back, by the aid of many lucky chances or miracles—whatever one may choose to call them—we know: the best of us did not return.

That quote just sends cold chills down my spine...

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Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast of Champions

If you believe in reincarnation, you could reasonably believe that Kurt Vonnegut was the reincarnated soul of Mark Twain. With their brief and minimalist styles, as well as their no-holes-barred aphorisms, these two authors managed to drive American literature to a place where substance could take a front seat in our collective consciousness in a way that's rarely accessible through other authors. In the process, they got us to question many of the sacred cows we usually take for granted. In the following reading of an excerpt from Breakfast of Champions, we get to see Vonnegut touch, in his uniquely hilarious way, on the American experience of racism, capitalism, free will, family values, patriotism, religion, parenthood and personhood. Best of all, we get to see that he was so funny he could make himself crack up :)

How awesome was that? :)

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The Real Victims of Gun Control?

The number of gun-related deaths in America, at least compared to civilized countries, is out of control (as you can tell from the poster to the right), but when it comes to reasonable debate, somehow we just lose it.

We are a freedom-loving people, or so we tell ourselves, and we get paranoid about losing the liberties that we care about, but we are also perfectly comfortable imposing our values and intruding in other people's lives when it comes to other things we care about. In this respect, only libertarians tend to be consistent in asking for almost complete government non-intervention in the choices that adults get to make. Conservatives and liberals, though, affirm one sort of freedom, but are happy to take away another. Just look at how they treat the first and second Amendments to the Bill of Rights to get an idea of what I'm talking about.

But the main problem, especially on the right of the political spectrum, has to do with the absolutely insane extremism associated with the fear of and opposition to gun control, to the point that, as the following clips from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart indicate, they are completely oblivious to the real victims of guns.

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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But let's not protect people from guns... let's protect guns from people:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
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And of course, while people are getting killed all over the place, this is the kind of thing that Fox News is upset, actually outraged, about:

If we're not afraid of fully automated machine guns, why are we so afraid of a discussion?

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"To This Day" ... for the Bullied and Beautiful

The saying goes that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me... I've broken my bones before, a couple of ribs, but there are forms of pain that are orders of magnitude worse, and which leave scars that last much longer, but that no one can see because they are not branded in your body; they are branded in your memory and soul...

Despite the amazing things that we have in this world, and despite the amazing things people do to help and inspire each other, there is still a very large amount of cruelty inflicted on people, especially the ones least able to cope with it. And even when we're not directly cruel, we are often indifferent, apathetic, and we blind ourselves to the cries of help that people who are drowning are barely able to make audible.

This poem, by Shane Koyczan, is dedicated to those people:

Sometimes, when the pain is too much, people jump off the cliff... but sometimes they fall because they've been brought to the brink and got pushed off by cruelty and indifference...

Do your part to bring light and laughter to people's lives...

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Wealth Inequality in America

If you consider the difference between what people think is the distribution of wealth in America vs what they consider the ideal distribution vs the actual distribution... you'd be flabbergasted...

The Occupy Wall Street movement tried to raise awareness about the fact that the bottom 99% of Americans have to live under the oppression, greed and corruption of the top 1%.

If you need to visualize these ratios in order to get a better sense of what's going on in the US, the following animation will be an eye-opener.

Go share...

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Porn Stars and Beauty Queens

Any lovers of irony or fans of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 out there? If so, I have a story for you...

So it turns out that Melissa King, a girl who did some porn to be able to make the money necessary to enter a beauty pageant, ended up losing her Miss Delaware crown for having been in said porn... oh irony of ironies...

Before my rant, because I do have a couple of things to say, here's the story:

Obviously, given the puritanical attitude our society has toward sexuality and how quick we are to condemn stuff that we privately can't live without, that wasn't the smartest choice on her part, but the real problem is the hypocrisy and double standards created by beauty pageants: on the one hand, they don't want their contestants to engage in public displays of sexuality, and punish them when they do; on the other hand, beauty pageants are in the business of objectifying women and exploiting their sexuality. Sure, they pretend that it's about etiquette, sophistication, intelligence, grace, talent and so on, but you know the kind of debacle you get when you actually ask these girls even simple questions whose answers are not as simple as "world peace."

Now, don't get me wrong, I have nothing against shallow physical attraction, or even against using our bodies to achieve certain ends, provided no one gets hurt or exploited in the process. I have no objection to the "beauty" aspect of beauty pageants, and I have absolutely no problem with the sexiness of non-exploitative porn (those assholes that try to degrade girls in their videos really are douchebags, though, and should be castrated).

If we think that it's okay to employ someone based on their intellectual abilities, it strikes me as hypocritical that we couldn't do the same for physical attributes. In fact, we do! That's what professional sports are about. It's only when it comes to sex that everyone gets bent out of shape. But here's the thing, as a person, you are both a mind and a body. To focus only on one of these to the exclusion of the other is to really objectify you, to ignore the totality of who and what you are, and to focus only on the part of you, whatever it may be, that turns you into some kind of object. Given this basic reality, it is probably impossible not to objectify people.

My problem with beauty pageants is the farce, the hypocrisy, the claim that you can't use your own body to express your sexuality unless they get to use your body for their purposes, the idea that displaying your body in their parade is okay, but that displaying it in a video somewhere else is not. You might say that beauty pageants want to set a good example for younger girls, and porn doesn't do that for obvious reasons, but here's the thing: neither do beauty pageants. Beauty pageants teach young, impressionable girls that the most important thing in the world is to be beautiful, not smart, not educated, not curious, not interesting... beautiful above all else. When was the last time you saw a fat or ugly chick win one of these pageants, no matter how interesting, articulate or intelligent she may have been? Hell, have you even seen them participate, let alone win? And worse, because beauty pageants are deemed as socially acceptable, they are more pernicious than porn. Most little girls don't want to grow up to be a porn star, but lots of them do want to be princesses and beauty pageant queens.... and we wonder why we have a problem of female under-representation in academically challenging subjects...

And another thing that's been bothering me for a while now is the number of people whose professional careers are ruined because of personal choices they've made in the past (or concurrently), and that have absolutely nothing to do with their jobs. Why are we punishing people for living their own lives? If you are a doctor during the week, and then make sexy videos on Saturdays, and you don't botch up your surgeries, what business is it of anyone else's to tell you you can no longer work for a particular hospital because of what you do on your own time?

If I go to the doctor, what matters is her ability to treat whatever is ailing me, not her personal choices (at least not if they will not affect my physical health); if I go to a lawyer, his weird foot fetish has absolutely no relevance to my corporate merger; if I attend a lecture, the professor's pole dancing skills at the strip club last weekend has nothing to do with her lesson on epigenetics; if I get arrested by a police officer, I don't get to resist on the grounds that I've seen videos of her naked online...

I may pass personal judgment on any of these people, or not, but why should they lose their jobs because other people and their delicate sensibilities are offended?

And the saddest thing in this story, having seen her video by now, is that this poor girl doesn't even have a future in porn: she kinda sucks... She really got screwed  :(

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If Richard Dawkins Died and Met His Maker...

Religious apologists have a long history of using the idea of death-bed conversions by skeptics as proof that God is real. Apparently, if you're afraid of one thing, that proves the existence of some other thing. One of the most often cited such conversions was Darwin's. That such conversion never actually took place matters little to charlatans who will lie and deceive in honor of their god, not realizing what an insult that is to the very god they worship... but that's how it goes, I guess.

When it comes to philosophers, it was David Hume's intellectual integrity and courage that shocked the world, and especially the renowned biographer James Boswell, who could not understand for the life of him why his literary mentor didn't think it was at all rational or prudential to bet on Pascal's wager as he was nearing death...

When Christopher Hitchens was diagnosed with terminal cancer, he took it one step further, pre-emptively arguing (starting at 7:52 in the video below) that any such possible conversion on his part, were it to happen, would most likely be an indication of his illness, medicine administered by doctors, or some sort of dementia.

Finally, and although he has not kicked the bucket yet, it seems that if Richard Dawkins were to die and find out he was wrong after all, and that there is a god, god who would be the one to end up getting bitch-slapped :)

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Cartography and Social Justice to Blow Your Mind!

There are some things that we take for granted as settled truth. I've always assumed that a map of the world is a fairly accurate representation of our planet, but apparently and under certain conditions, the kind of map we're most familiar with isn't even in the ballpark.

This all started last night, when I was looking at a map of the world like the one on the side, and it struck me that Greenland is slightly bigger than Africa. 'Wow,' I thought, 'I didn't know that.' Out of curiosity, I started to look at pictures of the globe instead of a map and I saw something that floored me: the sizes of these two land masses are nowhere close to each other. In fact, as it turns out, Africa is actually 14 times larger than Greenland! That's right, 14 times!

So why do they look so similar in size? Well, we live on a spherical, three-dimensional planet, and maps only come in two dimensions, so any attempt to represent a sphere as a plane, even with the most advanced of mathematics, is going to produce distortions, which is apparently why cartographers refer to world maps as projections.

Since distortions are inevitable, trying to produce an accurate representation of one variable will produce distortions in another. And the Mercator projection we're all so familiar with (like the picture on top), was invented in 1569 as a navigational map, which is fine if you want to go sailing, but not so good if you're thinking about how many soldiers you are going to need when you decide to attack your neighbors two doors down. With the Mercator projection, the closer you get to the poles, the larger that countries start to look, to the point that Greenland looks larger than a place that's actually 14 times larger than it!

Gall-Peters Projection

So, different projections help you visualize different things that you might be interested in. If you're looking for an area-accurate projection, there are a few that can do this, but the one that struck me the most is the Gall-Peters projection to the side. Doesn't it look weird and all stretched out? It may 'look wrong,' but it's actually closer to reality than what we're used to thanks to the ubiquity and popularity of the Mercator projection. We're just not used to it.

But it's not just a question of mathematical accuracy. Countless lives depend on this! For various psychological reasons, especially cognitive biases, we seem to be wired to believe that bigger is more important, that top matters more than bottom, etc. (I know, total sexual innuendo there), and so when we are thinking of the world's problems, our attention automatically tends to focus on the northern hemisphere first, which, in the Mercator projection looks substantially bigger than it actually is: Boom! Double whammy! And so countries in the southern hemisphere, which are usually the ones in greatest need of help, look smaller than they really are, and are the ones that end up getting neglected.

And apparently there are movements out there whose goal it is to raise awareness and standardize a more socially conscious world map that will help reverse this social injustice. Since the question of absolute accuracy is ruled out mathematically, we get to determine what other criteria it might make sense to use. One suggestion is using the Gall-Peters projection above, to produce a more realistic representation of the size of countries relative to others; others have proposed turning the map upside down to reverse the top-bottom bias; etc.

I'm not an expert on the subject, just having become aware of it last night, so I won't presume to have any particular recommendation, but I do tend to think that this is a conversation worth having. So, if this is news to you, share this insane finding with your friends.

And if you're curious about this topic, check out the Wikipedia entry on map projections or the Cartography and Geographic Information Society.

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President Obama's 2013 Inaugural Speech

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Michael Sandel - The Moral Limits of Markets

There are some things that money can't buy... for everything else... oh crap, there's no anything else! Over the past couple of decades, and without almost anyone noticing, we have turned from a market economy—one in which we use capital as a tool to achieve certain ends—to a market society: one in which market values replace all other values, and in which profit becomes its own end and the standard against which everything else is measured.

Philosopher Michael Sandel is worried about this growing trend. You might think that if people were paid for their services, their abilities, their bodies, and that if this is done with the consent of all involved, everyone benefits and it's all good. But if that's how you think, you've been bitten by the market society bug already... When we think that it's okay for corporations (or presidential candidates) to pay people to tattoo their bodies with company logos, for instance, or when we think that it's a good idea to privatize prisons and strip people of their civil rights so a bunch of corporate shareholders can maximize their profit, we have ceased to think of people as persons with dignity and worthy of respect, and we have started to think of them as commodities that can be bought and sold, used, abused and discarded like garbage.

There are some things money can't buy... and in the end, those are the things that really matter. Don't let the market society cheapen them by turning them into commodities to be sold to the highest bidder...

This could present problems for my endorsement of the legalization of prostitution... crap...

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Dan Ariely - The Truth about Dishonesty

If I were to ask you if you are an honest person, chances are that you'd say yes. Yet, if we look at the details of your everyday behavior with a magnifying glass, we'd most likely discover all sorts of ways in which you lie, cheat and steal, on a regular basis! Notice the irony? In answering a question about your own honesty, you behave dishonestly! Well, it's not quite that straightforward. It's not so much that you'd be lying to me; it's more that you'd be lying to yourself, and then to the rest of us as a consequence.

Our minds have an incredible capacity for compartmentalization: we separate into distinct groups instances of what ought to be logically identical situations, such as when you create the double standard that it's okay for you to take home some office supplies from work, but that it's not okay to steal an equivalent amount of money from the petty cash box. The other thing we're really good at in this context is rationalization: when confronted with our dishonesty, we are masters at justifying our behavior and turning it around to sound heroic: "it's okay for me to illegally download music because that means I'm standing up for freedom and fighting the corruption of multi-billion dollar music label companies, so if you think about it, I'm kind of a moral hero."

Well, in the following RSA animated presentation, Dan Ariely shares some of the fascinating findings of how everyday people like you and me cheat all the time, and what might be some useful mechanisms we can use to decrease our own corruption.

If you liked that, you might also like to check our our selection of TED Talk presentations.

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Steven Pinker - You're Already Committed to Reason

One thing that we philosophers love is questions and spirited friendly debate. This dialectical process helps us get a better grasp on various subjects, and though we may not always reach consensus, we do gain intellectual growth.

But this kind of attitude is not ubiquitous, especially for those just getting acquainted with philosophy. On many occasions, when dealing with some elusive topic, whether in epistemology, the philosophy of religion, or ethics, and especially when their beliefs have been challenged, some students will start to complain that maybe we should just abandon reason.

My tactic at that point is to ask them why that should be the case, at which point they will begin to argue their position without realizing that any argument against reason is going to have to require that they themselves use reason, which completely defeats their arguments. And apparently I'm not alone, at least Steven Pinker seems to be on my side :)

Nice, powerful and concise!

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Richard Dawkins - Sex, Death and the Meaning of Life (1)

Dostoevsky's dictum "without God, anything is permitted" is often used by religious believers to make the point that, quite aside from the issue of its truth, religion plays an important role, perhaps even a necessary one, in fomenting moral behavior and virtue. Without God, where would morality come from? If we were simply left to our own devices, what would be there to prevent absolute chaos, violence, crime and wanton lasciviousness?

Well, whatever you may think about the moral foundation of morality, as an empirical claim, it simply isn't true that without God or religion we would turn into savages. How do we know? For one, because non-human animals, presumably not being religious believers, do have all sorts of customs and rules by which they abide without having to descend into anarchy. And second, because when you look at the behavior or religious and non-religious people, you find that there is almost no difference there.

What religious people do have, though, is a lot of shame and guilt for things that should not be quite as big a deal as they think. So it seems as though religion is a self-perpetuating industry of devotion based on making its followers feel bad about themselves and then making them turn to religion for "salvation." Not much different from drug pushers, huh?

And it's getting to the point that religious people will go to all kinds of extremes to reconcile the inevitable cognitive dissonance they experience from the conjunction of their religious beliefs and their biological nature. Richard Dawkins explores these and other related issues

What exactly is the fascination with virgins? I never understood that one...

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Obama on Romnesia: Don't worry. Obamacare Covers Pre-Existing Conditions :)

Romnesia is a serious and highly contagious medical condition, usually related to Paulzheimers. As its name suggests, it's most obviously related to Mitt Romney's almost daily political flip-flopping depending on what particular constituency's votes he's trying to secure. If he's in Massachusetts, for instance, he will advocate for various liberal platforms and women's issues. When he's in the Bible Belt, he is all about religion and the need to go back to that time when people did whatever they thought their invisible friend up in the sky wanted them to (including, but not limited to, restricting the rights of women, minorities, immigrants, gays, etc.). When he's in a secret meeting with corporate moguls, he'll make fun of and dismiss 47% of the American public as moochers and irresponsible leeches, and when that tape becomes public, he's suddenly all about 100% of Americans. Poor guy...

This is a very serious affliction, but President Obama has some great news :)

That made my day...

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