On plagiarism

I'm not a fan of copyright. Plagiarism is like a worse form of copyright in terms of when infringement is activated, and its particular characteristics are where things could head if the movement toward less copyright fails. Right now plagiarism only has teeth because of its potential to ruin academic careers--if it had penalties similar to copyright infringement, this world would suck a lot. Am I against plagiarism penalties? "Don't spread the plague", as it were? No. I don't think plagiarism is entirely evil and schools who are active against it generally do better than otherwise. I think the the US school system's attitudes towards plagiarism need to change, but the status quo is better than eliminating caring about plagiarism altogether. I think in India much of the incompetence associated with their university graduates can be attributed to the rampant plagiarism of the students who feel like it's okay and disinterested reactions of the professors, as well as a cultural issue of being superior to your peers (some of whom may be in a higher caste!) in terms of productive work and accomplishment.

I had one incident in my academic history, in high school, where the teacher called my home and talked to my mom, who relayed the teacher's desire for me to come in to discuss a one-page paper she claimed I plagiarized. I was disturbed because I had not intentionally plagiarized, and I think the teacher knew that, so she cleared up for me what she interpreted as plagiarism so that I could avoid it and redo the assignment. I honestly don't remember the details of the assignment, I think it was something about researching some instrument and explaining very basic properties of how they worked, what sound waves they generated, and so on. I was uninterested in the original paper and the subject it was supposed to be about, but I wrote it up. I went to Wikipedia, listed it as my only source, read the article and a couple related articles, then regurgitated the important points in my own words. Is this not research? Apparently not. This bugged me and still bugs me to this day, so much so that when I try and write any "research" paper where plagiarism could be an issue, I write about what I already know, and write it "from memory" as it were, then hunt down references afterwards. I have a broad knowledge base compared to my peers so generally this works out, assignments are done quickly, and I can get back to real research and thought that doesn't require me to write a paper listing every idea that's not mine. I have no original ideas, after all. Everything I've created is just a remix. (Sometimes I'm not even aware of equivalent ideas, i.e. I :came up" with them "independently", but I think that speaks to the easiness with which such an idea can be formed by remixing and extrapolating from common knowledge.)

Research papers are funny things. In English, essays are really legal arguments where you argue opinions. They have utility in letting students exercise their creativity in a structured way, form their own opinions, argue for their own opinions and against others or responses, and so on. Research papers (at the 10th grade level at least) have less direct utility to the student. Really they're just a lazy way for the teacher to say "show me you spent some time learning about this thing or something of your choice." Real academic papers with abstracts and such have high utility in their content, but they even have some utility in the references list. The list isn't so much useful in showing some professor or journal editor that the author knows he didn't rediscover knowledge that's been around for decades or even hundreds of years, or to show the author has read about the subject, or to show the author knows how to paraphrase and quote correctly, but their usefulness is in adding a paper trail of important works within the subject for newcomers to follow and learn from if they don't understand your paper or want to learn what you learned that motivated you discovering, researching, or building whatever the content of your paper is about.

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Sci-Fi and actually alien aliens

This was a final essay for a sci-fi class last semester that I thought I'd share. The tl;dr is that I'm sad there aren't more creative approaches to aliens in sci-fi, but it's understandable why that's the case and why things probably aren't going to change in the near future.

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On the nature of reasoning with mathematical models about the real world, E.T. Jaynes in his book Probability Theory: The Logic of Science asserts ``Anyone who believes that he is proving things about the real world, is a victim of the mind projection fallacy.'' (My emphasis.) In his experience with English speakers, there's an ``almost universal tendency to disguise epistemological statements by putting them into a grammatical form which suggests to the unwary an ontological statement.'' He was most concerned about people treating their internal states-of-mind as an external fundamental truth about reality, but it generalizes--e.g. the fallacy underlies philosophical confusions about sound in a forest. He insists that probability is a state of mind representing one's absence of perfect information; reality itself is never uncertain.

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Is perception reduction sufficient for justifying a belief?

No.

"Perception reduction" is a common phrase amongst followers of Ayn Rand. Their argument is that, ultimately, conceptual knowledge must be justified by connecting it to human perceptions. Sometimes they misspeak and say "sensory reduction", which is very different. What's the difference between a sense and a percept? It's the difference between knowing "button 2513 is down" and knowing "some object is moving toward me at 5 m/s". In other words, perception requires an intelligent agent such as a person, a circuit, or an ant. Mere sensory data does not. A rock receives the same sensory input as an eye. It's important to note that humans are not rocks, and due to our complexity, perception is the base-level interaction we have with reality. Even for babies. (Something Rand did not believe; the science of the matter (perceptual psychology) has been done since her death in 1982. Alas, figures in history whose work did not contain hard mathematics and formal logic are destined to be shown wrong sooner or later on more or less all accounts. The degree of wrongness is varying, of course, and is often proportional to how mathematical an idea is without being pure math.)

Like much of Randian language, "perception reduction" is a moderately vague phrase with a moderately vague interpretation that can change. Is the Christian who insists they perceived God's touch and God's light justifying their belief in God? And indeed the brain is a complex piece of machinery: for mysterious reasons we can suddenly feel cold, or warm, even though we are not physically next to a source or sink of heat.

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TSA Patdowns

Here's a short rant I thought I'd share. Every six months or so I visit out-of-state family, and of course I fly. Leaving from Seattle is fine: the security line forks very clearly into a set of paths leading to the naked body scanner, and a set of paths leading to the standard metal detector. You can choose what you like, no fuss. I always choose the metal detector, because it's more secure. I don't care about the radiation, I don't care about naked photos. I'm against those scanners on principle that they're insecure and waste time and money.

On the return trip, however, the Salt Lake City airport has the metal detector and the scanner right next to each other, with a dude blocking the path of the metal detector's exit. You can approach the metal detector, and he might let you through. For me, he has never let me through, and asks I use the scanner. I refuse, and demand a patdown instead. Okay, it's fine.

But here's the stupidity: there's a side-gate he opens and asks me to step through to go to the patdown area. This side gate has neither scanner nor metal detector, so I bypass both. The idea of "security layers" has never occurred to the TSA. Why not make me walk through the metal detector to get to the patdown area? Then you are layering your security and it's harder to get past it. Apart from the lack of layering, here's what really annoys me: the subsequent patdown is a joke. Yes, I'm complaining that their patdown is not invasive nor thorough enough. As has been shouted by nerds ever since 9/11: SECURITY THEATER OMYGAWD!

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Why Maryland's new "ban employers from asking for Facebook user names and passwords" bill will fail

Before I explain, and my explanation will only take the next two paragraphs, I want to note that I find it incredibly difficult to feel any sort of sympathy for employees who are asked this question and comply. The proper response (even if you don't have a Facebook account) is "fuck you." The dumb response is "here you go, username is bob@bob.com and password is password1." The cowardly response, if the company has heavily implied that you will not have your job much longer if you don't comply (or not be hired in the first place) is the same as the dumb response. You are working for an unethical company, leave. And look, I'm not insensitive to a pragmatist. If you keep the "fuck you" to yourself, but delay with either a "I don't have a Facebook account" lie (make sure you have good privacy settings and an ambiguous avatar to keep the lie going!) or a "I don't remember my password, my browser does at home so I'll give it to you tomorrow" excuse so that you can create a fake facebook account to give the info for instead, and you make use of your delay to search for another job without the hassle of being unemployed while searching, then I'm fine with you. I just don't sympathize with straight obedience to such requests.

Now here's why a law against this won't work. Companies that do ask for these details are unethical. There's nothing wrong with a company Googling employees or prospective employees to see what they can find, but they cross the line when they demand such people hand over that information to them or else. Having established that such companies are unethical, in the face of this law we can infer that they will simply no longer ask.

It is trivial for a company to set up a server that all network traffic in their building must pass through, and they can log it all. Are you never going to check Facebook at work? If you have that level of mental discipline, you wouldn't be working at an unethical company in the first place! Is Facebook using SSL to prevent logging servers from reading your traffic? That's okay, the company's logging server can issue its own SSL certificate instead of Facebook's so that it can read the traffic. The company can even install their certificate on all their company machines as a trusted certificate so that the browser gives no warning. (And even if they didn't, many people ignore such warnings.) Now that they're reading all the traffic you send, they can watch what you do on Facebook and everywhere else, and that's entirely legal. Many companies in their employee handbooks state that there is "no expectation of privacy". Many companies have security cameras monitoring everything, and at minimum content filters to keep employees from watching porn, but they can also set up the system I described of routing and logging all traffic. And since we're dealing with an unethical company, they might even cross the legal boundaries and sign into Facebook as you (having intercepted your username and password when you typed it in, or intercepting your session cookie). Hence whatever goals this legislation intended to achieve will not be achieved.

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Theorems are more powerful than laws

Very quick thought/assertion I'm exploring. It came to me several months ago when I watched a Scott Aaronson talk about quantum physics and P vs. NP. He made a joke that "If P and NP were studied by physicists, they would have declared P != NP a physical law and moved on." But P vs. NP is a mathematical question, it's not something we can observe like mass and energy, it's a question of logic, and it seems there should be a mathematical answer (proof). I'm frustrated humanity doesn't have an answer to it, I can't even imagine the frustration people who spend their lives actually trying to answer it must feel.

Laws are easier and lazier and you can guess at them just by opening your eyes. Theorems take a lot of mental work. When we humans discover a new law, we gain power over the universe. But when we discover a new theorem, especially a new way of obtaining theorems as Wiles did for Fermat's Last Theorem, we humans gain power over logic itself. And power over logic is more powerful than power over the universe.

Or is it? I've reconsidered. There is the possibility that the universe, being the ultimate arbiter of experimental results, may provide us humans with a result that crushes the whole notion of logic and proof far more so than Godel's theorems ever did. I think it's highly unlikely, but if it happened, the physicists would declare this new experiment showing a fundamental problem with logic as a law and move on, while logicians and mathematicians would be dumbstruck about what to do next with their lives.

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What's the problem?

There has to be a psychological term for this. There's the fallacy of imagination, which I thought might be suitable, but that means something quite different. What I want to talk about is this: there is a tendency among certain people to pause time and the laws of physics when talking about what will happen if you change just one thing in a system. I guess it's really a failure to notice complex systems with several causal inputs and several effect outputs, sometimes effects having feedback loops back into the system as inputs.

For a simple example, consider a house of cards. Now remove the bottom layer, but pause gravity so the house doesn't instantly come falling down. What happens? Well, it sits there, you can keep building it up in midair, or if you push just the top part only the top part will fall off, but the house will remain intact...

For another example: College costs a lot of money, and the federal government is deeply involved with the loan business that "makes college affordable." One thing the government does is enforce arbitrary interest rates that are "low" and all but guarantees any student who wants a loan can get one. Now remove all the government's tentacles from the system overnight. And pause the laws of physics. What will happen? Why yes, the liberal nightmare! With only private companies being able to give out student loans at their own discretion, they will do so at huge interest rates, and no one will be able to afford college. Especially not poor performing students.

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