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Comment by linkregister | Hacker News Reader

It's not a fully consensus view, but a majority of sociologists agree that high severity deterrence has limited effectiveness against crime. Instead, certainty of enforcement is the most salient factor.

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Correct. We also have evidence both from cheating in sports and in academia that stiff punishments do not work. Many people hold the false belief that if it is easy to cheat then the punishments must be extremely severe to scare would be cheaters. It just does not work. Preventing cheating is way easier said than done.

> We also have evidence both from cheating in sports and in academia that stiff punishments do not work.

Maybe so, but there is evidence that lack of punishment also don't work.

Neither extreme "works". Just because terminal punishments do not prevent the worst cheating does not in any way imply that slap on the wrists reduce incidents of cheating.

That's the American spirit. "We got to do something!" "Does it work?" "We must do something!"

I don't understand what point you are making.

Are you claiming that one of the extremes "works"? That the "light punishment" route reduces cheating? Or maybe has no effect on cheating?

There are two extremes; I am not arguing that the one extreme (terminal punishment) reduces cheating, I am saying that the other extreme (light punishment) does not reduce cheating!

You say that stiff punishments have no effect on the cheating rate, right? Compare to what exactly? Compared to no punishments? Compared to light punishments? Compared to medium punishments? Compared to heavy but non-terminal punishments?

Now that I've reread your comment, I'm extremely skeptical that terminal punishments have no effect on the cheating rate compared to light punishments or compared to medium punishments.

It's an extraordinary claim, so I want to see this "lots of evidence"; the evidence should basically show no correlation between cheating and punishments.

I want to see that chart you base your belief on.

Enforcement without consequences just wears down the people who are supposed to enforce it.

GP suggested a life ban. Maybe suspend for 6 months instead? That's a long time without publishing in the current publish-or-perish academia.

> Maybe suspend for 6 months instead?

Suspend for 6 months from a conference that is held yearly?

I wasn't thinking about ICML specifically. My mind was on the ARR.

There's a pretty large area between "no consequences" and "banned forever"

The point of a punishment is not solely to deter future crimes, it's also to actually punish the present crime though

For instance jail time is not *just a deterrence, it's physically preventing someone from committing more crimes against the public

But this method is now spent, as if someone is determined on keep using LLM, this should be pretty easy to overcome.

I suppose though new methods could be devised, but it's not "certainty" that they will catch them.

That's not true. People still pick up USB sticks from the street, people still fall for scam phone calls and people still click on links in mail.

Just because a method was successful once does not mean it was 'burned', none of these people will be checking each and every future pdf or passing it through a cleaner before they will do the same thing all over again and others are going to be 'virgin' and won't even be warned because this is not going to be widely distributed in spite of us discussing it here.

If anything you can take this as proof that this method is more or less guaranteed to work.

Yup, precisely this. Doing something bad is rarely a rational commitment and cost of benefits. Likelihood and celerity of getting caught seem to be the driving factors.

Deterrence is only part of it. It's morally instructive, it tells people that they live in a society that takes rules seriously.

What is the aim of "moral instruction" if not deterrence? Surely it needs be instruction in pursuit of an outcome?

It makes honest people feel rewarded, valued and acknowledge. It teaches people who wish to follow the rules and conform to social norms what those norms are and where we actually draw the line in practice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punishment#Education_and_denun...

Looked at slightly differently, given a split between high trust and low trust preventing conversions from high to low is similarly important to inducing conversions from low to high.

> Instead, certainty of enforcement is the most salient factor.

hodgehog11 is proposing effectively no enforcement

But the mob wants their kick.

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