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Comment by alexb_ | Hacker News Reader

Look at it this way. Cheating and not cheating has its own risks associated. And when the risk/reward of cheating vastly outperforms on average compared to the risk/reward of not cheating, every single rational actor will cheat. In fact, not cheating is a purely irrational thing to do given that you know these odds - it's based on a belief that your individual action will make any sort of meaningful difference.

And why should any young person think that? Just observing the world around them definitely says the opposite.

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Yes, if you exclude ethics - issues of right and wrong - there's little reason not to cheat. But excluding ethics from the picture is more than just "look at it this way", but being amoral. You know, like a psychopath. I hear that's also rewarded in the business world, but doesn't mean you personally have to like it or be that way yourself.

Well, also I would strongly prefer my doctor, pilot, surgeon etc not to be there just because they cheated in exams, but because they know what they're doing.

Wow, that went quickly from what could have been an interesting discussion on ethics to accusations of amorality and labelings of psychological problems.

Is it ethical to wrangle students through inane, dull exercises that seem practically designed to kill their curiosity and desire to explore knowledge?

In that situation, would it not seem more ethical to get past the exercises in the quickest, least-damaging way possible to be able to do more fulfilling things in life?

Or is doing exercises a moral obligation, regardless of their ill effects on the student?

That's a discussion worth having. "You know, like a psychopath" short-circuits that.

> Is it ethical to wrangle students through inane, dull exercises that seem practically designed to kill their curiosity and desire to explore knowledge?

You mean like what they are going to have to do when they actually start working?

You can always discuss the fact that the exercises are bone chillingly boring with the professor, and potentially you don’t even have to do them because all your score comes from the test.

But at the end of the day, if your professor/boss tells you to do the boring stuff, you either do it, quit, or get fired.

They are students attending a university to learn new material from a professor who is an expert in the material and has taken the course themselves. The “inane, dull exercises” may be what is expected in the career path chosen.

Cheating only kicks the can down the road to a failed career and possibly even criminal behavior. Best path for a student with that attitude is to drop the course or push through it and reevaluate their educational choices.

> In that situation, would it not seem more ethical to get past the exercises in the quickest, least-damaging way possible to be able to do more fulfilling things in life? Or is doing exercises a moral obligation, regardless of their ill effects on the student?

If you only care about yourself and not the impact on others. Cheating is not a zero sum game. You are depriving others, and are committing fraud.

Perhaps the least damaging way would be to seek professional help to better yourself so you can cope with any “ill effects” you get from doing “inane, dull exercises”.

Or finding a course or career that doesn’t require you to endure activities you don’t want to do. Running your own business maybe.

I feel like you're the one unhelpfully flinging accusations. Apparently I'm not allowed to respond in the way I did? Your comment itself seems to "go quickly" from ethical discussion to short-circuiting that with feigned surprise - "Wow". Your first and last paragraphs do little but accuse/label, and your comment would be far better without them. But then it would just consist of 3 apparently rhetorical and rather loaded questions. It seems they're actually making a statement - so why not actually make that statement, actually say what you wanted to say, instead of letting the unspoken do all the work, and making me guess what that statement is.

What I was saying was amoral and psychopath-like was the act of "excluding ethics from the picture". You have reacted as if I'd said that the person I responded to had those qualities. Sorry I wasn't clearer, to avoid that apparent misunderstanding.

Your questions seem puzzled, irritated, as if I obviously have no common sense or understanding of what life's like, and you've had to instruct me in the basic realities, like a condescending teacher to an unlearning novice. I'm not sure what I said that suggests that. I would've thought it would be uncontroversial, a mere repeating of the dictionary definition, to suggest that to exclude ethics from the picture when acting in life is amoral, and like a psychopath.

Personally I see it as a moral imperative to be honest, and that includes not cheating on tests. This isn’t rational in the sense of being a logical consequence of some other, more fundamental principle. But it’s also not irrational. It’s just a different set of goals.

…On the other hand, a big part of the reason I ended up with that set of goals is that it worked well for me when I was young, for both practical and emotional reasons I won't waste your time with. So I won't claim to be holier-than-thou. And I don't feel entitled to judge people for having different principles.

Based on this logic we should all be criminals so long as we can easily get away with it? I’m not ok with that. That is not a civil society.

Cheating is a form of fraud, and fraud is a crime.

Doesn’t this logically lead those that don’t want crime and cheating to clamp down hard on these acts to discourage them? Ie should we have harsher punishments? Expel students? Convict students?

The process you are discussing is better summarized as: "a Nash equilibrium is not necessarily Pareto optimal, and vice versa." That's the issue with making it about ethics versus success: most successful people just aren't ethical. Entire companies are built around "cheating", and it is often seen as a good business strategy (e.g., Walmart running a store at a deficit to put competitors out of business).

Want people to stop cheating? Fix the incentives. Stop using a points evaluation system, and curves. The professor in this article managed to redesign his assignments to more or less make cheating difficult, and suddenly it was less of a problem. Imagine that!

> The professor in this article managed to redesign his assignments to more or less make cheating difficult, and suddenly it was less of a problem

The students on the next semester used DMs, as the end of the article points out, and the professor didn't care, which means that the amount of cheating for that semester was unknown and hence, not less of problem. Unless that is, you're the professor and seem unwilling to punish cheats, or you're one of the students who cheated.

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