Gah! I have a Zoom legal ethics program om professionalism to teach in about 30 minutes and overslept, so you’ll have to hold down Fort Ethics until I can get a post up around noon. Sorry!
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Ethics Alarms 
Jack isn’t the only lawyer in this group, so…
Someone please explain to me the rationale behind the overturning of the Weinstein conviction. It was my understanding that NY law permits evidence of “prior bad acts,” but allowing such testimony seems to be central to the decision came from the NY Court of Appeals.
I’m not arguing against this decision (not yet, at least); I’m just confused.
Let me start by quoting from the opinion itself: "Under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged and, thus, allegations of prior bad acts may not be admitted against them for the sole purpose of establishing their propensity for criminality (see People v Molineux, 168 NY 264 [1901]). Nor may the prosecution use “prior convictions or proof of the prior commission of specific, criminal, vicious or immoral acts” other than to impeach the accused’s credibility (People v Sandoval, 34 NY2d 371, 374 [1974])."This is pretty much black letter law throughout the American trial court system. The rules of evidence restrict the use of prior misconduct because of the significant prejudicial effect this information has on a jury. So a prosecutor is not allowed to put in evidence of prior episodes of misconduct, even misconduct that is identical or similar to the misconduct charged, unless that prior misconduct tends to prove the charge that is actually under consideration. In my experience,this happens most commonly when a defendant has a particular modus operandi and that same modus operandi is present in the misconduct at issue.The prior bad acts are admitted to show that the defendant likely committed the current crime because he exhibited the same pattern of behavior in previous ones.In this case, the prosecution offered the additional bad conduct evidence to establish Weinstein’s forcible intent. The appellate court found that this was a pretext because forcible intent could be readily inferred from the testimony of the women about Weinstein’s actions for which he was charged. There was no reason to offer the additional bad conduct evidence and, in fact, the prejudicial impact from that evidence significantly outweighed any benefit that it offered to the prosecution’s case. The court determined that the evidence was classic “propensity to commit the crimes charged” evidence and therefore should not have been admitted. It clearly affected the verdict and therefore the case must be retried.
Ethics Alarms regulars should recognize the Madison area unethical progressive blogger I’m about to reference. Almost the entire blog post is partisan political projection from a progressive that has no double standard or hypocrisy revealing mirrors in his house and has shown himself to be a partisan attack dog. In my opinion, the blogger has absolutely no self awareness that he is completely consumed buy the extreme political left and their constant false narratives and this blog post from him is a good example of this. It’s a bit frightening knowing full well that there are people out there that actually believe tunnel visioned, cultish partisan wackos like this.
Donald Trump’s Lies, Fox News Kneels, GOP Base Laps It All Up (Please, Sir, I Want Some More)
Take a couple of minutes to read it and then, if you dare, offer a rebuttal reply and see if he will post it. Fair warning this blogger moderates all comments and rarely allows comments to post if they firmly disagree with him. Stick by your arguments in opposition to his unethical nonsense and he’ll likely ban you like he has done with me.
One Example From His Text, “As we know Trump accumulated 30,573 lies and willfully repeated glaring misstatements during his presidency — averaging about 21 lies and erroneous claims a day. All of them were recorded and detailed by the Washington Post.”
The author of that blog has been informed about the Washington Post Trump’s Lies nonsense as recently as 2022 and yet he continues to state it as fact.
https://dekerivers.wordpress.com/2022/05/08/senator-ron-johnson-owes-wisconsin-an-apology-for-being-party-to-vaccine-aids-lies/#comment-95883
Later in that same thread the blog author states, “I know The Washington Post to be accurate, and fact-driven.”
Side Note: That’s the thread that got me banned from commenting on his blog.
“I know The Washington Post to be accurate, and fact-driven.”
Deke is ideologically prepubescent, and the only one who doesn’t know it is him.
WaPo Headline: The Campaign TO IMPEACH PRESIDENT TRUMP Has Begun.
The date? January 20, 2017..oh yeah…accurate and FACT driven!
Anywho, Deke is ideologically prepubescent, and the only one who doesn’t know it is him.
Can’t find it now, but HT b!tchslapped his sorry @$$ into the cheap seats here a while back. I posted it to his site; the whiny slobberfest he upchucked in response was the stuff of which train wrecks are made.
PWS
I read the essay and it impugned Trump voters by calling them an undereducated cult & that Trump’s lifestyle is despicable.
He didn’t bother with citations beyond the WaPo’s tally of Trump’s lies. This is not a person with whom you can agree to disagree, as he sees all Trump voters as a group unworthy of decency or respect. He doesn’t want to know why people may decide to vote for Trump.
I’m reminded of an old saying about wrestling with a pig, & Deke is the pig.
“I’m reminded of an old saying about wrestling with a pig, & Deke is the pig.”
Bravo Indigo November Golf Oscar!
PWS
What’s the goal here, though? I’m not going to argue that Trump is a good person. I don’t do that for any politician. I discuss policy first. Only once we have some level of consensus on policy can we meaningfully discuss which politicians we trust to implement that policy (or choose a policy based on data), and why we think we can trust them.
Right now people are arguing about why they trust untrustworthy people, but I suspect they feel that way mostly because they have no choice. They’re given two options: politicians who don’t care about their concerns, and politicians who pander to them. Instead of demanding and supporting actually trustworthy alternatives, they accept the easy answer and convince themselves it’s a good one.
Is Trump being unfairly criticized? Yes. Do we have a vested interest in people using critical thinking and intellectual honesty when criticizing politicians? Yes. However, starting out by arguing the fine points of people’s criticism will not accomplish that goal, because they will remain afraid of their image of Donald Trump and the idea that a majority of people would embrace that image.
We need to address their fear first. We start by establishing to their satisfaction that we understand and respect their policy interests enough to support them to some extent. You don’t have to support their interests exactly as they describe them, as long as what you do leaves room for them to achieve what they’re looking for on their own terms.
Once they’re no longer afraid of us being corrupted into people who doesn’t care about them, we can discuss the pros and cons of Donald Trump as he affects the other person’s goals, and the pros and cons of him as he affects your goals. We can discuss how we wish people would criticize him, and what we think he could do to improve people’s opinions of him.
If you’re looking get people to listen to you and take you seriously about politics, would you be interested in trying out the latest version of the Values Reconciliation Workshop?
That’s all well and good when you are discussing something with whom you have even a severe policy disagreement. We can find the common ground that we can agree on, look at the facts, and proceed from there. What do you do, however, when the other person not only disagrees with the facts, but if such a thing as objective fact exists at all? Or even worse, that your insistence that objective reality actually exists is evidence that you are a racist, and therefore that your every word should be dismissed as the racist screed it self-evidentally is? How can one reason with a person who is wholly committed to fighting reason itself? Especially if a commitment against reason is an assured path to gaining power and acceptance in the bizarre world.
To be fair, I don’t think there are many people who subscribe to this level of nonsense, but there are some. And I fear they reside in positions of power and authority, in both the government itself, and worse, in academia.
Find what they fear. Epistemology, our methods for making predictions about physical reality, are based on risks, although few people acknowledge it. The people you describe fear that if they allow themselves and others to accept an objectively observable reality, something will happen that they are not prepared to deal with. What is it?
Next is planting the idea in their head that they will be able to handle the consequences of acknowledging an objective reality, and that they’ll have support from other people in doing so, and inspiring them to embrace that idea. Sometimes, rather than spelling it out directly, it’s more effective to just incidentally mention the things that will address someone’s fear, demonstrate their reliability, and show how much better life becomes when people accept support and work with objective reality rather than just rejecting it.
I have no intention of doing this all myself, one human at a time. These people may be the last adopters. They will find themselves losing followers, and they will either choose to learn and challenge themselves as well or they will be left alone.
Does that make sense?
Extradimensional Cephalopod,
Interesting reply.
How about you put into action that which you profess is the right way of online communication (as opposed to the wrong way) and head straight over to the blog I linked to and show us how it’s done. I tend to learn by example, set the example instead of “preaching”.
I’m completely serious.
I reread the article you linked. Step 1 is to understand one’s own values. If I’m to comment on the article, I need some sense of why I think the article causes a problem directly.
Yes, it indicates bad intellectual habits to accept the idea that Trump lied thirty thousand times, but that in and of itself isn’t an actual problem. If someone believes in ghosts, there’s no pressing need to challenge that belief if it only leads them to talk about ghosts and burn sage every so often. If they start building proton packs, then it’s time to have a talk with them about what they expect to accomplish and where they intend to aim those things.
So what’s my motivation? Am I trying to inspire the author to consider that Trump might be trustworthy after all? Do we think Trump actually is trustworthy? Can we instead ask him about what he’d like to see in an elected leader? What do you fear will happen if this person keeps writing articles like this? What articles would you rather he write instead? (Is anyone else even reading his articles? His recent articles on Trump don’t seem to have any comments.)
The point of Step 1 isn’t just to prepare to explain oneself to others. It’s also to help us decide which conversations actually matter.
I also checked out the other article you linked. The author seemed to put up with a lot of disagreement in the comment section.
That aside, I can tell you how I would have handled the argument about Donald Trump’s quote on Article II.
“It sounds like when Donald Trump said ‘Article II allows me to do whatever I want. Article II would allow me to fire him.‘ you are taking that to mean that he thinks that the Constitution gives him unlimited executive power. Is that correct? Is it that you do not trust him to know that he doesn’t have unlimited power, or you do not trust that he was speaking sloppily and had no intent to convince anyone else he should have unlimited power?
“For all Trump’s faults, and his blustering to his supporters and opponents as if he has more authority than he does, I think it is more likely that in this case he was saying that within the context of the subject at hand, the appointment of federal officers, he can decide to fire whomever he wants. People exaggerate like that all the time, and given that nobody believes Article II gives the president absolute power, it seems a stretch to think that Trump expected to convince anyone of it.
“Upon actually reading Article II, I don’t think it explicitly says anything about the president firing officers, so I’m not sure where presidents derive that authority from. However, even if Trump were wrong about that, and even if he did want to achieve and maintain absolute executive power, I don’t think this is the sentence that proves that.
“I recommend putting more effort into watching his actions and avoiding getting hung up on what he says. His words are empty and create distraction and confusion, which is bad for a president to do but ultimately not a cause for serious concern. If his actions overstep his bounds, though, then we’ve got a reason to call for him to face consequences. In the meantime, it would be a good idea to find a competent replacement who can constructively address the concerns of as many people as possible, to have the greatest chance of replacing Trump as president.”
Thoughts?
With all due respect, stop telling me what you would do or telling me how I should do things and just do it yourself and allow others to learn by setting the example that you think others should follow.
It took a while, but I found an angle on that article you linked from April 23rd, 2024. My comment is in moderation. I’m not sure what you’ll think of the approach I take, but we’ll see what kind of response it gets.
EC wrote, “It took a while, but I found an angle on that article you linked from April 23rd, 2024. My comment is in moderation.”
Thanks.
I’ll read it if he allows it to be posted. Just so you know; if you challenged him beyond his capacity to defend his position it’s not likely that he’ll allow it to be posted, but I hope I’m wrong. We’ll have to give it a few days to find out.
You got him talking, that’s a good thing. Now expand.
Your approach to dekerivers blog post was fine but in my opinion your discussion regarding the Washington Post was softballing almost to the point of rationalizing. As we’ve discussed right here on Ethics Alarms, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that the Washington Post is in the top ten media outlets that are the worst, most unethical, most unreliable, constantly wrong, and the most partisan news outlet in the USA, they simply cannot be trusted. In my opinion softballing the Washington Post feeds into the delusion that they are “accurate, and fact-driven”.
Here is the first part of my reply to dekerivers (aka Gregory Humphrey the blog author) reply to you.
There’s more of my comment that discusses the obvious confirmation bias in dekerivers reply. It appears that dekerivers goes along with the unspoken tactic that judges anything that Trump says that Democrats disagree with is a lie.
My reply is in moderation. My approach to this situation is based on the tradeoff called trust. There is a disagreement about whether people should trust the Washington Post. The way to resolve disagreements about trust is not to prove or disprove that trust is already warranted, but to figure out what it would take to earn that trust. Then people are free to decide whether or not to take those steps. They are responsible for their choices.
For example, if I were having this conversation with the Post, and the Post didn’t take reasonable steps that conservatives agreed would advance trust, it would become obvious to the public that the Post did not prioritize being considered trustworthy by conservatives.
Regarding my earlier reply, if you want someone to reconsider their position, the most effective way to do it is by starting from within their position (after you understand your own goals). Think about how doing things your way can accomplish their goals, and present suggestions from that angle. Find things you can legitimately agree on. Accept as many of their assumptions as possible within the context of the discussion, in order to get to what you really care about. It will make things easier, not harder.
Also, please don’t participate in the demonstration. We already saw your approach. In the process of saying things you may be justified in saying, you are sacrificing effectiveness. Just like not every action that is legal is ethical, not every statement that is justified is going to persuade people to reflect on how you may be right.
EC wrote, “My reply is in moderation.”
No it’s not, dekerivers replied to your posted comment and I replied to his reply.
Sorry, I should have been less ambiguous. I was referring to my second response on the post, which I submitted this evening. Based on his first response, I suspect he may not check blog correspondence on weekends.
Your newest reply has already been posted. Here is the rest of my comment that he refuses to post.
I stand corrected; my second reply was approved.
You make good points, but the way you make them means that people have to spend extra effort to figure out that you’re not just basing them on confirmation bias yourself. They also have to spend extra effort to overcome their emotional reactions to your contempt. This is less effective than it could be.
To you, you are just expressing your concerns. To them, they hear someone who does not care about their concerns. Until they understand that you care about their concerns, they will find it very difficult to listen to yours. There is a famous quote attributed to Theodore Roosevelt: “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
Having walked that path myself, I was very frustrated until I developed the skills for making it easy for people to reflect on what I say.
To modify a quote from Elwood P. Dowd, “In this world, you must be oh, so smart, or oh, so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I prefer… smart and pleasant!”
EC wrote, “You make good points, but the way you make them means that people have to spend extra effort to figure out that you’re not just basing them on confirmation bias yourself.”
I hope you’re ready to support the apparent insinuation you made in that sentence, it appears to me that you insinuated that there is an appearance of confirmation bias in the comment I posted to dekerivers reply; please explain why you, or someone else, might get that impression.
EC wrote, “They also have to spend extra effort to overcome their emotional reactions to your contempt.”
Wait just a minute EC, you think I’m supposed to coddle to possible emotional reactions from them when I present truth and facts? I stated the truth and facts and my opinion based on those truths and facts and I did not attack dekerivers in that comment warranting any kind of justifiable emotional reaction. Truth and facts stand on their own regardless of emotional reactions and if the recipients are not capable of controlling their own emotions when faced with the truth and facts then they should seek professional psychological help; this is their personal problem not mine and I will not coddle to it.
EC wrote, “To them, they hear someone who does not care about their concerns.”
So me beginning and ending my comment in a way that very specifically agrees with them on two major topics of their opinion isn’t sufficient in your eyes to show them that I think there is a solid foundation of human commonalities to bridge the apparent ideological walls between us and that I’m taking his concerns into consideration and trying to build a basis for further conversation?
Lastly, EC wrote, “they will find it very difficult to listen to yours”
Difficult to listen to? Awww, that’s so sweet.
People like dekerivers puts himself out in public with a blog, literally makes himself a public figure of sorts, and then puts his confirmation bias front and center and actually bans those who write opinions he’s uncomfortable with so he can maintain some kind of ideological bubble around his opinion/blog. Gregory Humphrey (aka dekerivers) creates himself a kitchen (blog), turns on the rhetorical heat (attacks those he opposes), and then when it gets hot in the kitchen due to responses to his rhetorical heat he literally suppresses the freedom of speech of the opposition, honestly EC, who holds the ethical and moral ground here?
(Splitting my reply for easier reading. Reply 1 of 2.)
It’s not about your reasoning. People may project their own confirmation bias onto you. A person who weights evidence to support their own opinions, regardless of whether they realize it, will assume that those who disagree are doing the same thing.
To be fair, people’s conclusions are based on risk just as much as evidence, even if they don’t acknowledge it. Considering evidence “more significant” just means “we can’t afford to dismiss the danger this could indicate”. Considering evidence less significant means “on the off-chance this turns out to be a porten of doom, I think I can handle it.”
You provided evidence that something Trump said should not be counted as a lie by the Washington Post because there is a reasonable interpretation under which it is true. For this reason, you believe people should stop extending trust to the Post. The author may think that the interpretation under which it is true is not that reasonable, or that Trump intended the statement to mislead people into believing something false. The author may fear the consequences of giving Trump the benefit of the doubt, or of distrusting the Post’s criticism of him.
Without explicitly thinking the above, the author may come to the conclusion that you are interpreting the evidence you provided so that it supports your criticism of the Post’s trustworthiness. He’ll also wonder why you feel so strongly about this point even though you say that you do not support Trump.
I reviewed your comment, in particular the agreements you mentioned at the beginning and end. Agreeing that news should be objective, and then immediately stating that his preferred news source is not objective is… technically finding common ground, but doesn’t leave enough room for building rapport. The statement you agreed with is too trivial. It doesn’t show you understand his perspective.
People take this approach all the time, especially in political attack ads or in family arguments. (Those always end well, right?) “I agree that honesty is important, but I’m not hearing any honesty here!” “I, too, care about the American people, which is why I’m calling on you to resign!” That does not build trust. It just comes off as a cheap jab.
It doesn’t matter that you also don’t support Trump, because in the author’s mind, failing to condemn Trump as much as possible is still dangerous. We can work with that, though. It just means we need to show people that we will address what they fear even if we sometimes disagree with criticism of Trump. Ideally, we want people to not feel existential dread if Trump is elected. Maybe they’d even be willing to take some risks and nominate a presidential candidate who isn’t an octogenarian puppet.
There’s at least one way to prevent people from projecting their confirmation bias onto you. You can take the initiative and do the one thing that a person with confirmation bias never does: do research on your own initiative that leads you to change your mind on something related to the issue, no matter how small.
You showed nuance when you said you didn’t support Trump, but in the eyes of many people you’re still a stubborn obstacle preventing progressivism from solving all the problems that matter, just for different reasons than the Trump supporters. Having nuanced opinions is not sufficient evidence that you’re willing to reevaluate those opinions. The latter is what convinces people that you’re worth listening to.
EC wrote, “You provided evidence that something Trump said should not be counted as a lie by the Washington Post because there is a reasonable interpretation under which it is true. For this reason, you believe people should stop extending trust to the Post.“
FULL STOP!!!
That sir is not what I wrote in my comment to dekerivers that you were supposed to be evaluating…
In fact EC, I never mentioned the Washington Post in that comment, my comment was much more general and directed at the political left as a whole. You are correlating multiple comments made by me with the comment I shared above that I tried to post on Caffeinated Politics and I think that it may have unfairly biased your evaluation of what I actually wrote.
I stopped reading your comment at that point because I know full well that you have unfairly correlated multiple comments and that would likely bias how I read the rest of your comment.
Feel free to try again.
I’m getting severely mixed messages here. You’re obviously correct that you didn’t explicitly say in your attempted Caffeinated Politics comment that the Washington Post is not worthy of trust.
However, we have the context that the author of Caffeinated Politics said that he trusts the Washington Post data about Trump’s lies and that the media should objectively report facts. You then replied saying that the left leaning media complex has not objectively reported facts, but instead has produced propaganda.
If you didn’t intend to imply to the author that the Washington Post was part of the propagandistic left leaning media complex and that therefore people should not trust it, and in particular should not be citing its database on Trump’s lies, then… why the hell did you butt in to the discussion you asked me to conduct? What exactly were you hoping to accomplish? How are your true intentions so different from what I inferred that you feel justified in ignoring everything else I wrote about how other people will interpret your comment?
It’s been a while, and I’m still waiting to hear what you were trying to accomplish by attempting to enter a conversation you asked me to demonstrate with a person who already blocked you. If I was so wrong about what you wanted to convey to him, what were your real intentions?
And what do you think of part 2 of 2 of my response to you here in this thread?
EC,
I wrote all I intended to write.
Well, for all my skill at identifying people’s concerns, I must confess, I’m not sure what offended you. You asked me to demonstrate a constructive conversation using my techniques. You then attempted to comment on a blog from which you were banned, to criticize the person you were asking me to talk with.
I pointed out that other people (who may be influenced by confirmation bias) can’t tell from how you write that you aren’t being influenced by confirmation bias yourself, and you seemed to become angry and asked what would give them that idea. I started by restating the point I thought you wanted to make, and you seemed to get angry because that apparently wasn’t the point you were making, even though you expressed it to me here on this blog and it seemed to be the basis for the post you attempted to make on the other blog. And now you refuse to clear up this alleged misunderstanding, even though it would be easy. I do have one hypothesis, though…
The difference between you and me, Steve, is that you think you already know all the answers that matter, and can’t tolerate any other possibility. If an argument threatens to teach you something new, you look for any reason at all to abandon it, no matter how ridiculous or hypocritical. I’ll bet you haven’t learned a thing about people since you were in high school. The humans who raised you did you a disservice by not impressing on you the importance of humility. …It’s not a flattering hypothesis.
By contrast, I think I can learn anything I need to, which means I’ll look for any excuse to continue an argument if I think that I or someone else will learn something useful from it. It’s caused problems in the past, but it’s what allowed me to improve and accumulate the concepts and skills I’ve been using to help people. That’s why my arrogance is superior to yours.
Of course, I’d like to learn that I’m wrong.
EC,
You’re showing a bit of hypocrisy. I realize you likely did that like some internet trolls do to try to suck me back into a conversation that I was clearly done with. I allowed you the last words and got nearly 600 of them, so be it. You’re welcome to your opinions on the topic at hand even if we disagree. You’re also welcome to your opinions of me even when they are assumptions.
I’ve moved on, maybe you should consider doing the same; it won’t make you any less right or wrong by doing so.
(Reply 2 of 2. This one has nothing to do with what you tried to post to Caffeinated Politics, so it is not invalidated by any potentially mistaken assumptions about your messages.)
If you want people to listen to why they should change their minds, then yes, you are supposed to coddle their possible emotional reactions. If you don’t care whether they listen to you or not, then you can say whatever you want. However, I would consider it peculiar if you took that same approach a dozen times and were still frustrated that people didn’t listen to you.
Empathy mindset isn’t about forcing people to change their minds. It’s about creating the conditions under which they are likely to do so. I didn’t invent these skills–there are dozens of books on them, used by very successful people. All I did was compile the concepts that make it much easier to use empathy in the context of disagreements.
Do we want to live in a world where people are intellectually honest, don’t need challenging ideas sugar-coated for them, and (ahem) don’t look for reasons to dismiss each other? Yes! Absolutely!
Are we going to build that world by speaking bluntly to people and waiting around for them to develop the maturity and intellectual honesty to listen to things they don’t want to hear? I wouldn’t count on it.
Is it annoying to have to accommodate people’s biases just to get them to suspend those same biases? Yes, absolutely! I’ve gotten good enough at it that I regard it as a challenge, but it’s still galling that I have to put in extra effort because humans are too immature to think about problems like responsible adults.
The reason I do it is to lay the foundation for a world where the vast majority of people are intellectually honest. Part of that is helping people understand that intellectual honesty entails understanding why other people are inclined to interpret the same evidence differently, instead of assuming that any different conclusion means the other person is not intellectually honest.
If I had nothing to look forward to but telling humans how smart they were in order to try to stop them from continuing to do bafflingly stupid things, I’d have laid waste to your civilization by now. As it stands, humans can do better, and the way to achieve that is to address the fears that lead humans to do what they do, so that they’re willing to let go of their assumptions and find out they can accomplish when they bother to learn things.
How does that sound?
Oh my, the author of Caffeinated Politics is on a roll, here’s his most recent post that’s pure correlation equals causation. The morally bankrupt blog author should be ashamed of himself, but him being a pure blood drooling progressive attack dog I’m sure he doesn’t care as long as he can smear all things Republican. Truth be damned.
Racism Used Again By GOP, Brown-Skinned People Targeted In ‘Voter Fraud’ Lies
I’ve been ruminating on this one, on-and-off, for a while…thirty-four years. It pops into my mind and chews at me a bit, then I forget about it for ten years or so, rinse and repeat. Well, it returned again over the weekend.
In 1989, I took a course in database design (ComS 361) at Iowa State as part of my major. When it came time to prepare for the first exam, I was talking with a fellow student about how to study, and he suggested going to the library and checking the “old exams” section. He said professors would occasionally put old sample exams there to give students a sense of the flavor and direction their testing took.
Great idea, I thought…until then I had never heard of such a thing. So I headed to the library and sure enough, my professor had an old exam on file. I checked it out and studied it along with my notes and development code. When “exam” day arrived, the professor handed out the exam and as I looked it over, I was completely stunned. The exam in front of me was, almost word-for-word, the exact same exam that the library kept on file. That’s not hyperbole: I probably could have made a copy of the library exam, put my name on it, and turned it in.
Needless to say, I completed the exam in 15-20 minutes of the allotted hour, then sat and looked busy for 20 minutes before submitting the exam and walking out, amazed and a little guilty at my good fortune. I don’t think I ever got a perfect score on anything in college, but this one was something like 95-98%. I aced it.
But that has never ceased to bother me. Was it unethical of me take that test under those circumstances? Should I have quietly said something to the professor after-the-fact…and maybe asked to take a substitute exam during his office hours? Sure, the sample test was available to all, but it’s possible few people took advantage. Did I have an unfair advantage?
No, you didn’t because it was available at the library. The college I went to sold old exams right along with copies of power point slide notes. It’s not your fault the teacher didn’t create a new test. You still studied and took the test. It is called being resourceful and in the real world that’s more important than passing a college test.
If you had the old exam right there to copy off as you were taking the new one, that would’ve been cheating, but you were going off what you studied beforehand, so I’d say it’s okay.
Nope, everyone else could have done that. Professors do reuse questions and sometimes whole tests. The professor probably forgot that was the test he put on file, the blame is on him. A friend reused an exam that was still in circulation and a student brought it in to ask some questions from this old exam. He answered all their questions even though they were the test questions. Sometimes you luck out, sometimes your diligence pays off more than you thought it would.
I once gave a test that was just taken from homework problems, homework problems I covered in class to review for the test…problems with worked out solutions I put on the internet and directed them to study. The point was that a large group of students was complaining that my tests were NOTHING like they had ever seen before and there was no way they could pass. After this test, they went to the Dean to complain that I TRICKED them by giving them the answers to the test to study without telling them they were the test answers. They wanted me punished for it. I think that went over as well as the students who complained that the book the physics professor assigned for a class was WAY too difficult and the Dean should force him to make the class easier. The book was ‘Physics for Dummies’.
The guilt is probably arising from obtaining knowledge not available to all other students. The professor certainly already knew the library’s resources. Perhaps he even had a sentence in the syllabus alluding to the “study tip”.
No. You had no duty to the professor or your fellow student. The very same thing happened to me in law achool: my Oil and Gas professor used Texas Bar exam questions for the final. i didn’t know that.
I was using bar prep materials to study for all off my finals because final exams are more about test taking than actual legal reasoning. So, I worked the bar exam questions along with my notes. I knew the law and could work through the problems. Other professors used bar exam questions, too. When I saw the Oil and Gas exam, I recognized every question. I did well and thought nothing of it. That the professor was lazy is not my fault. That others didn’t use bar prep materials is not my fault.
jvb
A ‘Get Out the Vote’ group in Arkansas was caught using a classic phishing scheme and is now crying ‘voter suppression’. Get Loud Arkansas set up a website that looked like the official forms. It collected people’s information required for Arkansas’s voter registration plus additional information, saved that information, then filled out the REAL online application for the person.
So, the website is collecting sensitive information from people who believe it is an online voter registration site. They then send information to the ACTUAL online voter registration site and register people. How is this not a phishing scheme? How has this not corrupted the voter rolls? Who is to guarantee that people actually filled out those and this software wasn’t used to generate fake voters? Why do they get to collect this sensitive information from prospective voters to use in their campaigning efforts?
Maybe I should expand my problems with this.
(1) Collecting information that can be used for identity fraud.
(2) They added a party affiliation line. What if they only submit the Democrats and don’t submit the Republicans?
(3) What if they change the addresses to ones they control so they can get mailed a bunch of mail-in ballots?
(4) What if they just fabricate people out of thin air?
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/04/25/1247021109/states-find-a-downside-to-mandatory-reporting-laws-meant-to-protect-children
Mandatory reporting laws have always felt authoritarian invasive and statist.
It also doesn’t seem surprising to me that replacing familial abuse or neglect with state-sanctioned abuse or neglect by grinding children though courts and foster care systems doesn’t result in better outcomes.
It’s good to see some introspection on the topic, but disappointing it has to be viewed thigh the ‘racism’ lens. I suppose this framing will yieald the solution to investigate more implausible reports involving majority races in order to get enough equity to investigate a plausible minority report. Zugzwang for sure.
I know of 2 white families reported in the past year, both of the fathers work for me. Both were eventually cleared, but the system has a bit of a “believe all reports” and “guilty until proven innocent” stench all over it. In one case, the family has 6 children and were reported because a neighbor (who didn’t like the noise of children playing outside) reported the family because children were playing outside “without a parent present” ( who was inside in the kitchen watching through a window). What should have been a 15 minute visit and case closed took a couple of weeks to work through the system. In the second case, the family had just bought a house and were in the middle of moving. One of their kids in 1st grade said something about no food in the kitchen (because they were unpacking boxes as part of the move). Teacher reported, and the government made a visit that afternoon. They saw the family was moving and there actually was food being unpacked from boxes. Again, what should have been a 5 minute visit turned into a multi-week process with a follow up inspection (!) to make sure everything was acceptable once the boxes were unpacked.
I understand the other side, and don’t want to miss actual abuse, but the mandatory reporting guidelines are so loose that anyone could be reported for about anything if a child says anything slightly off (or was joking). Then the massive bureaucracy around the system and rigid zero-tolerance policies incentivize the government employee to assume the worst and treat the accused as such. I also know the workers at the bottom mean well, but the bureaucrats and politicians set up a bad situation in the name of “think of the children.”
I’ve seen mandatory reporting used as a fig leaf to cover by one of the reporters covered by it. They did not report everyone, but when they did so retaliatory they used the “mandatory” language to say they were forced to it… even though the allegations were flimsy. Seeing those laws not being enforced on the other side (punishment for failure to report) I believe they do more harm than good.
https://x.com/nypddaughtry/status/1783685819573600382?s=46&t=hYBRdyKc75ixaD6bBbzJZw
He’s the deputy commissioner. And he’s asserted that police can’t intervene against crime on private property unless invited.
So, now we know that his officers are vampires.
https://overcast.fm/+8mlJnQ_Sk
Excellent conversation.
Here is a bit of observational data for you all to ponder.
This weekend I was at a science fiction convention in Richmond Virginia. Last weekend I was at a similar convention in the Triangle area of North Carolina.
My observation was that significantly more people are wearing masks in Richmond than in North Carolina. Nowhere near a majority but noticeably more.
It’s a factoid–make of it what you will. I found it fascinating.
https://x.com/TracesofTexas/status/1784962731008811298