Comment by trevcanhuman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by trevcanhuman | Hacker News Reader

It just baffles how much effort as humans of modern education and academia have put into being super mad for using other people's ideas. Sure, I agree that this guy is somewhat the victim and she shouldn't have done that.

But really, how is it that we've come so far as a society and just scream at things like these ? Isn't knowledge supposed to be shared ? Even if it's not properly attributed ? There are plenty of misattributions in Mathematics, theorems who people did not create or develop at all, yet their name has been recited for years and years in elementary and middle schools. Yet teachers will say that plagiarism is bad! But hey, don't worry if we call this theorem like this because this is ok and it's actually not plagiarism. We're literally just regurgitating ideas, as several commenters have said (good luck getting the primary sources for my comment lol).

Also, should my ideas be considered plagiarized even when I thought of them before someone else published them ? Interesting dilema, at least for me.

In an academic context, plagarism enforcement is less about the theft of ideas (which are no less stolen when simply regurgitated with a citation next to them), than as it is about establishing a chain of influence.

If I write an article that uses someone else's ideas, then I cite them, so that a reader can go "huh, that idea's interesting, let me go see where that came from" and then they can see what influenced those ideas by that papers citations and so on and so on.

The fact that students don't have this concept of intellectual chain of custody hammered into their skulls is a failure of the education system. Citing quotes is obvious, but in this day and age it's probably the least necessary. I can Google an exact quote and find exactly the article it came from. Much harder to search is provinance of paraphrased idea or general concept, or the source of a factual statement that I find dubious.

> It just baffles how much effort as humans of modern education and academia have put into being super mad for using other people's ideas. Sure, I agree that this guy is somewhat the victim and she shouldn't have done that.

Degrees are awarded off the back of people producing work. If you reproduce another's work instead of creating something original, even if you then go on to make superficial modifications afterwards, you have not produced work and gaining qualifications off the back of that is fraudulent. Citations of sourced work, among other things, exist to declare the parts of work which are not your own.

Maybe use plagiarism to detect influence of thought & ideas as trees instead and reward accordingly? Problem is though, that rewards self-promoters instead of rigorous scientists.

Congratulations, you've reinvented citations. Paper A cites papers B, C, and E, which in turn cite F, etc.

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