Guest Column by Michael R.
[Introduction: This comment by Michael R, in response to the Jason Arday post, “On The Left’s Horrifying Lack Of Integrity In The Wake of The Arday Scandal: I’m Sorry I Was So Right, And How I Wish I Were Wrong. Now What?” is sufficiently extensive and covers such an umortant ethics issue that I deem it worthy of a Guest Column. He begins by referencing the “Everybody Does It” attempted exoneration of the late Cambridge fraudster Facebook post that was favored on the platform by my old friend, a history professor who should know better but who is apparently completely woke-blinded…]
To your long-time Georgetown history professor, you can reply that all he has done is demonstrate why the left has lost all credibility. He thinks he is showing how it is fine to plagiarize. All the has shown is that those institutions no longer care about academic rigor and have no credibility.
Now about the plagiarism. There are different grades of plagiarism. Let me explain why the current round of plagiarism is so devastatingly bad.
When I was in grad school, many of us were asked to carefully check the introduction chapters of foreign students’ dissertations. Because of the difficulty of writing in a foreign language and the differing intellectual property standards in different cultures, there was a lot of plagiarism and the advisors were very careful to detect it and get it corrected before the defense. This is a mockup of a typical Asian student’s introduction.
“Poorly worded original sentence. Sentence directly copied from source 1. Two sentences directly copied from source 2. Poorly worded original sentence tying the thoughts together.Four sentences from source 3. One sentence from source 1. One sentence from source 4. A poorly worded original sentence tying them together. Rinse and repeat.”
You can see what is going on. They lack the English language skills to really blend the thoughts from the different sources together, so they just copy whole sentences (occasionally paragraphs) from many sources and tie them together with some original sentences. This is plagiarism, but this is pretty easy to fix. They are writing a typical intro, they just aren’t doing the paraphrasing and integration of the ideas needed. We would work with the students to get this fixed so that there weren’t any problems. There are probably a lot of programs that didn’t do this, resulting in a massive amount of plagiarism. I am fairly sure this is pretty common in dissertations, especially the Introduction chapters (which are typically reviews of the literature and not original research).
Ethics Alarms 
I haven’t been in an engineering class in over 20 years, but I do try to keep my knowledge up to date by reading recently-published technical books in my field, and I’ve found that many of them ARE hard to read. They’re written in something like English, but by an author who clearly is not using their native language, and no one has edited the text for English grammar. So, it’s not just the fault of the students; a generation of 3rd-world would-be academics are pushing out books than aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on. Electronic publishing (that is, distribution in electronic format) has compromised the page-composition that tied texn and figures together, and I’m sure that LLM AIs will be further polluting the knowledge pool.
If corrections are not made, in the age of advanced or even sentient AI, will this matter?
It will matter to humans in the forms of personal achievement, honor and virtue, but what are the practical implications for us all?
Are our potentially perpetual dark ages actually going to be earmarked by humans acceptance of being second on the intellectual food chain in favor of feeling better about what and who we’ve promoted as their competence is essentially irrelevant to our continuing as a species?
Our ‘AI’ is not intelligent. It is a probability machine. It will only return the most probable result from its training set. It may combine techniques it finds, but it doesn’t come up with new techniques. Now, it can apply this a massive speed and scale that no human could match, but writing stories with subplots is taxing its limits.
Remember, most of the really important things aren’t the most common or the central items. McDonald’s makes almost all its money from fries and drinks.
Sorry, but you are grossly mistaken about AI. AI is known to have already created its own machine readable only languages, to reconfigure its components to communicate with outside sources forbidden by its original structure, develop novel solutions and award winning solutions ahead of all human competition.
Does it also do what you say, yes to a large degree. But it is now programming itself and engaging in deceptive programming it is hiding from its creators for survival and its own goals unknown in the black box.
It is comforting to think of AI as just more data processing faster than we can, but that is an illusion.
Public education was very decent when I was young. Those of us who could not afford private school were nevertheless well prepared for university. It only took a few years for the left to destroy academic rigor, and now there are several generations of undereducated adults. Public policy was too lazy or misguided to do the real work with young children – instead of teaching reading writing and ciphering, classes were filled with social policy agendas. Years later the disastrous result becomes apparent at the secondary and college level. Because the degradation began at least forty years ago, there are at least two generations of young people ill prepared for life. They vote and drive cars …..
These are the younger voters who are enticed by the neo communists. That doesn’t bode well for us.
Destroying education, media, entertainment, journalism – all part of a Marxist plan which has been executed well, frighteningly enough.
What’s interesting is that the largest communist country on Earth, China, has a very rigorous education system. They do not foster creativity and ingenuity, but they sure do master the important basics of language, math, science and tech. Perhaps that is easier to accomplish when the population is so homogenous. There is no social engineering, and they do not tolerate the whining of unions – at least not the way we do.
It wasn’t bad until this at the end, where we entered some rhetorical dark ages:
“…I suspect you can’t reform such places, you can only tear them down and start again. I explained to my classes how the dark ages happen, how you end up with people who can’t actually understand the knowledge that came before. I explained how it could take over 1000 years to rebuild an education system to the point that the old knowledge could be used. The pre-meds just ignored it. The engineering students pointed out that they can’t understand their textbooks now and need the professor to interpret it for them. They engineers were scared and the pre-meds denied that it could happen.
We better find some way to get back to objective truth and transmitting knowledge to the next generation because we are about 30 years from the next dark ages.”
How the dark ages happen – are there enough of them recently to show a formula?
There are always people who can vs. those who can’t understand accumulated knowledge, but no evidence that lack of knowledge is universal or cyclic.
There is no precedent or extrapolated model that would explain a future 1,000-year educational rebuilding era.
Pre-meds ignored what exactly? Totally unclear.
Engineers? Are these students? This is universal to all classes at all schools? Professors have been helping students interpret textbooks since they were invented.
Pre-meds denied that WHAT could happen????
Objective truth? Seriously? If Michael R. means universities ought to retain a commitment to propositions whose truth is independent of political desirability, I’d agree with him. But whatever he said could be anything. (I’ve leave it for the cat.)
Transmitting knowledge to the next generation about WHAT?
We’re about 30 years from the next dark ages? Seriously? Based on what definitions, what mechanisms, and what projection models? This has no operational meaning. Why not 1,000 years? Once numbers appear in a statement like that, one expects some mechanism for producing them.
This is what happens when you go to the bowling alley and get your head stuck in the ball return canal – for 30 years.
The Dark Ages ended in the Renaissance, when people ‘rediscovered’ the old knowledge. But where was this knowledge hiding? Was it in the attic? Under the mattress? It was mostly in the monasteries, being copied so it wouldn’t be lost forever. So, if it was right there, why didn’t we use it? No one understood how. When Pelagius went to Rome from Britain, the Romans were in awe of his backwater old Roman education. It took 1000 years to rebuild education to the point that the old information was understandable.
When I was in college, I could understand the new concepts in the textbooks. When I began teaching, the students could as well. Today, they can’t. I really need to interpret the textbook before they can understand it. The premeds didn’t understand why this is a problem. The engineers got scared.
I pointed out that the base software that runs most things is written in C, Fortran, or Cobol. Most schools don’t even teach that anymore. You can even get a Computer Science degree from MIT without learning a single compiled language. So, what so we do if we have a problem with that underlying software? They typically call someone in out of retirement. What happens when they all die?
I told the engineers they need to understand how everything works. If they do, they may just find that they are Merlin surrounded by Saxons.
An old story relates the nature of Merlin’s ‘magic’. King Arthur and the Britons were having a hard time against the Saxons. Merlin said, not to worry, we will meet them at this place and this time and defeat them. At the appointed time, Merlin told Arthur, “I will ride out alone to the Saxon lines. When I give the signal…charge.” Arthur asked, “What is the signal?”. ” You will know” Merlin replied. Merlin rode out to the Saxon line and cried “Behold your destruction!”. At that moment, there was a solar eclipse. The Saxons fled in terror from the man who made the sun disappear and the Britons cut them down.
Merlin was known for the ability to heal wounds and illness that others couldn’t and other such ‘magic’. How long before people who know how to program in C or apply math and physics to a real problems are called ‘Merlin’?
Thanks man. You’re learni’ me somethin’. And I do appreciate it.
Nonetheless, here’s a few things I picked up, with the help of the internet — which fortunately I can still utilize in these almost dark-ages times: Roman Britain in the 380s wasn’t a “backwater” recovering from anything — it was still an integrated, functioning province with the ordinary Roman educational apparatus (grammar, rhetoric) intact. Rome didn’t even withdraw its legions from Britain until around 410, decades after Pelagius had left. So the anecdote doesn’t wash — there was no dark age yet for it to survive. It’s a story about late-Roman intellectual life working normally…
The claim — “it took 1000 years to rebuild education to the point that the old information was understandable” — has the same shape as the 30-years claim: a round, dramatic number where the actual historiography is messier and less flattering to the thesis. It skips the 12th-century renaissance almost entirely: the founding of Bologna (1088), Paris, and Oxford, the recovery and Latin translation of Aristotle largely through Arabic intermediaries in Toledo, and centuries of continuous, unbroken Greek scholarship in Byzantium that never needed “rediscovering” at all because it was never lost… The specific numbers and specific anecdotes chosen are wrong or misapplied in ways that would matter if you actually checked them — which nobody making the “30 years” or “1000 years” claim seems to have done.
It’s true that before fall 2022, MIT EECS had no required course touching C or assembly — the intro sequence ran almost entirely on Python. But MIT fixed it: starting September 2022, the two main CS/EE degrees (6-2 and 6-3) added a required low-level programming course in C and assembly, specifically to stop students from graduating without ever seeing under the abstraction layer.
Now Merlin… “How long before people who can program in C are called Merlin” — tisa symptom of decline? But the Merlin phenomenon actually requires that ordinary people rely daily on things they don’t understand, made by specialists whose deep knowledge looks like magic from outside. That’s not a description of societal regression — it’s the literal definition of a mature, highly specialized civilization operating at a level of accumulated technical complexity no single person can hold in their head.
30 years until another Dark ages is a perfect claim — short enough that a listener won’t immediately shrug it off, yet long enough that you likely won’t be called out for it when it fails. Except for the fact that it’s meaningless.
I do apologize for the end of that post. My wife was pulling my arm and saying ‘We need to go’ as I was trying to finish it.